Pressure Project 3
Posted: October 22, 2024 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »For pressure project 3, I tried to think of something centered around sound that was really important to me growing up that I would able to find resources for or representation sounds for. Something that really stood out in my memory — and what I eventually settled on — was my time in my highschool marching band. I spent all of my free time and really grew up in band, so it seemed like a good topic for an assignment about sound and culture.
I realized when doing this project that I don’t have nearly as many videos and sound recordings of my life as I would like. My photos app on my phone, social media channels, drives, and physical storage are filled to the brim with pictures capturing my life, but there are barely any videos of anything. In the current age of technology, I’m so saddened by this. It’s so easy to press record on my phone and capture things and yet there’s not a lot from this time in my life and others to work with.
With this in mind — and determined to not switch ideas or give up — I contacted some old friends and asked for anything they had, as well as scoured the internet for things that other people in the community had posted openly around eight years ago. I was able to scrounge up a fair amount of videos, so then it was a matter of making meaning out of them.
My intention with the project was to capture the feeling of being in marching band and the community that went on behind it. Most of what anyone ever see’s with performance groups is the final stage piece — polished and clean for public consumption. The final performace is a bit part of it since it’s what we work toward for months at a time, but it’s not everything. It doesn’t really capture the people that make up the performace, how we interact with one another, and the work that goes into the end vision.
To do this, I tried to mix and match videos of performace with the band goofing off and bonding. I tried to keep away from any chronological order with my source videos and tried to balance putting silly stuff next to serious stuff. I also book ended the project with the ‘standard’ announcement that all bands here at a performace and the more personal send off that our band did at the end of every practice. This mix of universiality of personal memories was also important to me in this project.
One note I have from the project was I wish it didn’t rely so heavily on the visuals. For something so centered around music, it was hard to find audio that made sense without the context of the visual to go along with it. I suppose I could have centered the audio more around a feeling than events and people, and that might have made more sense in a solely audio context, but in the moment I couldn’t justify getting rid of visuals when the medium on marching band is also highly visual. If I were to go back and do it again, I would work more towards a piece independent of video though.
Regardless, I had a good time doing this project and living in my memories for a little bit. It’s always nice to look back and feel nostalgic for awhile. 🙂