PP3 Sound project
Posted: October 25, 2022 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »For this project my first idea was to work with a story that I always remember first when thinking of books/stories that stuck with me when I was younger. The story I chose to represent through sound is from the book called Palle Alone in the World by a Danish writer Jens Sigsgaard. Since I never read this book in English I know the book as “Pale sam na svijetu” and I always remembered the look of this cover because I liked the illustration style in the book:
Since my perception and understanding of the book has always been based on the visual, I thought it will be interesting to imagine what the events in the book would sound like. I always associated the book with happy memories but just thinking about recreating it through sound I could tell that it is probably going to sound kind of daunting and portraying overall a stressful experience. In the book, the boy Palle discovers he is totally alone in the world and so he goes on doing whatever he wants without any restrictions, he tries driving cars, he even crashes a car, he steals money from the bank, he eats all the food he can eat in the grocery store… The approach I took in the project was to depict the sounds of his actions and experiences in the order that they occurred, condensed in 3 minutes, and I also overlayed some slow piano music to create a dreamlike mood, since at the end of the book we find out that this was all just a dream.
I used the sound level watcher in Isadora to listen to the sound of the piece and use that to distort the picture of the book cover. I did this because as I was working on this project and listening to what’s happening in the book, my perception of the book and how it would feel to be Palle started to change.
Just the visual:
On the day we were showing the projects, I couldn’t use my Isadora file on the Motion Lab computers because I was using some of the effects that I previously had to install as plugins on the classroom computer I have been using, so I didn’t end up showing the visual portion during the experience. I wish I could have but it was still very interesting to hear the reactions people were having even without the visual. The visual was still quite abstract not knowing it’s a book but I think the picture does provide some context of “children’s book”, and it also gives further flow since it is constantly moving. Maybe I also thought this because I personally prefer to have something to look at, but I realized that’s not a universal preference. Based on the comments I got, a lot of people understood the moods and the narrative I was trying to convey which was good to hear. The comments included the observations that the events are linear, occurring in a specific sequence, and happening right after one another not in a way you would normally expect but it also still feels continuous, interpreting the sound through child’s perspective, the feeling of uneasiness, and getting invested in some sounds more than other like the sound of eating, walking on the grass, or unwrapping a chocolate bar. Another interesting aspect of the experience was being able to add and manipulate the lighting as the audience was listening to it, which is something I haven’t thought of before because I was not planning initially to show it in Motion Lab but I decided to after hearing how immersive the other sounds were in there.
I also remember thinking of this book sometimes when Covid first started when I had a very bad experience being stuck in a house with toxic and insane roommates and not being able to see my friends, so for me this book also relates to this time period.