Radio Chthulucene 87.9 FM

My piece was workshopped this week, and I got a lot of great feedback from my peers and professor. While I was originally less interested in receiving advice regarding the audio portion of the project, I came away from workshop with several ideas for how to sonically convey the themes of my piece more effectively.

There are many sounds I ended up including. A lighter sparking. Ceramic plates tapping against one another. A sponge wringing water. The clicking of a keyboard. Et cetera, et cetera. By playing each of these types of sounds during corresponding sections of the project, I hope the temporally-segmented, yet thematically-connected parts of the piece are bound together in some way by these effects. 

Furthermore, while I did not find—or, in some cases, did not try to find—a way of translating every visual aspect of the piece into its auditory equivalent, I maintained as many as I felt necessary. Which ended up being more than I originally planned to. 

I’ve never tried spoken word before. I read my poems aloud to myself all the time as I write them, but I’ve never performed a proper reading. Reading this piece aloud, I found myself interested suddenly in the range of possibility that comes with having a spoken variation of one’s work.

In this piece, I tried to experiment with the white space on the page by leaving silence between the words in certain parts of the “MOTHER” and “BOTTOM” sections. It conveys, via sound (or lack thereof) the themes of silencing and losing of one’s voice which the blank spaces of the page transmit visually. The potential for translation between written and spoken language will definitely inform my work going forward.