Week 2: Interview Recording Technique and Oral Histories

What could be defined as an audio paper manifesto? Who gets to write the history books? Has pandemic listening changed our range of sources for information and debate? 
What role does the voice of the researcher and presenter have in our understanding of sound? 

1. The audio paper affords performative aesthetics.
2. The audio paper is idiosyncratic.
3. The audio paper is situated and partial.
4. The audio paper renders affects and sensations.
5. The audio paper is multifocal; it assembles diverse and often heterogeneous voices.
6. The audio paper has multiple protagonists, narrators and material agencies.
7. The audio paper brings aesthetics and technologies together in mediation.
8. The audio paper is a constituent part of larger ecologies.

Audio papers resemble the regular essay or the academic text in that they deal with a certain topic of interest, but presented in the form of an audio production. The audio paper is an extension of the written paper through its specific use of media, a sonic awareness of aesthetics and materiality, and creative approach towards communication. The audio paper is a performative format working together with an affective and elaborate understanding of language. It is an experiment embracing intellectual arguments and creative work, papers and performances, written scholarship and sonic aesthetics.

schulze@soundstudieslab.org

Poetic mode –

Early documentary filmmakers, bolstered by Soviet montage theory and the French Impressionist cinema principle of photogenie, appropriated these techniques into documentary filmmaking.

Koyaanisqatsi, Godfrey Reggio, 1982.

The expositional mode diverges sharply from the poetic mode in terms of visual practice and story-telling devices, by virtue of its emphasis on rhetorical content, and its goals of information dissemination or persuasion. Characteristics:

• 1. Omniscient voice-over. One characteristic of expository documentaries is the “voice of God” narration. This authoritative voice accompanies the documentary’s images, defining the visuals for the audience, and explaining rhetorical content to help make the film’s case. The voice-over conveys information and does not provide personal accounts or subjective experiences to share a narrative.

• 2. A “right” answer. Expository documentaries don’t leave much to subjectivity— they want the audience to feel a certain way about the content they are seeing. Rhetorical questions, recounts of history, and interviews are often presented to support the film’s claims, along with any other relevant evidence.

• 3. Evidentiary editing. While visuals in the poetic mode documentaries are meant for emotional or artistic purposes, expository filmmakers use images as a means to support their claims. Images on-screen are explained or supported by captions or commentary. This kind of editing style is also used for news broadcasts.

Participatory mode-In the participatory mode “the filmmaker does interact with his or her subjects rather than unobtrusively observe them.”

Observational mode/Reflective mode/Performative mode

Stephen Shore’s Artist’s Statement example-

Until I was twenty-three I lived mostly in a few square miles in Manhattan. In 1972 I set out with a friend for Amarillo, Texas. I didn’t drive, so my first view of America was framed by the passenger’s window.

It was a shock. I would be in a flat nowhere place of the earth, and every now and then I would walk outside or be driving down a road and the light would hit something and for a few minutes the place would be transformed.

Color film is wonderful because it shows not only the intensity but the color of light. There is so much variation in light between noon one day and the next, between ten in the morning and two in the afternoon. A picture happens when something inside connects, an experience that changes as the photographer does. When the picture is there, I set out the 8×10 camera, walk around it, get behind it, put the hood over my head, perhaps move it over a foot, walk in front, fiddle with the lens, the aperture, the shutter speed. I enjoy the camera. Beyond that it is difficult to explain the process of photographing except by analogy:

The trout streams where I flyfish are cold and clear and rich in the minerals that promote the growth of stream life. As I wade a stream I think wordlessly of where to cast the fly. Sometimes a difference of inches is the difference between catching a fish and not. When the fly I’ve cast is on the water my attention is riveted to it. I’ve found through experience that whenever–or so it seems–my attention wanders or I look away then surely a fish will rise to the fly and I will be too late setting the hook. I watch the fly calmly and attentively so that when the fish strikes–I strike. Then the line tightens, the playing of the fish begins, and time stands still. Fishing, like photography, is an art that calls forth intelligence, concentration, and delicacy. 

A NOTE ON ‘VOICES AT THE MARGINS?’

‘At the margins’ is a broad phrase we used to refer to the multifarious forms of experiences and spaces that have traditionally remained at the periphery of public and scholarly attention.

Voices may be located at the margins as a result of power dynamics that under-recognise, marginalise, exclude, silence and/or oppress specific identity groups or members of society. Voices, memories and histories can also be at the peripheries of societal discourses when becoming unacceptable in dominant political and cultural contexts that foster the circulation of some ideas and stories over others.

I am interviewing my friend about what means food in Taoism? She said it means one plate has two meals. One green and one red. The red one could be a juicy chicken leg or pan-fried meat with other veggies. But the red one should be 1:2 with the green one. The green one could be fried broccoli or salads, it could be added a little bit of parmesan cheese and eggs. It needs to be crunchy. We could add a little bit of spring onion but not add too much. Maybe a dish of fruit would be like decoration. But everything should be fresh, organic, easy-made, and healthy in vitamins.

I am not shy to show my voice because last year I was doing a Chinese drama but I found it quite tricky and awkward to speak in front of myself and I found it as embarrassing as I am chewing something.

When we make a recording of our own voice then play it back, we are hearing it more or less as other people do. The sound waves travel as a series of vibrations through the air and meet our ear drum. The ear drum in turn sets three tiny bones vibrating – the incus, malleus and the stapes and they send vibrations into the cochlea. The cochlea translates the vibrations into nerve signals and those are sent to the brain. Why then does that sound so different to what we perceive as our own voice? When you speak you hear your own voice in two different ways. The first is as above, vibrating sound waves hitting your ear drum. The second way is via vibrations inside your skull actually set off by your vocal chords. Those vibrations travel up through your bony skull and again set the ear drum vibrating. However as they travel through the bone they spread out and lower in pitch, giving you a false sense of bass. Then when you hear a recording of your voice, it sounds distinctly higher and the comparison can be quite surprising.

Pandemic listening-I found this word definitely suits my topic because residents in Shanghai change their thoughts on food after the pandemic hunger.

“What a difference a lockdown makes. The sociological transformation of this building in the past several weeks has been profound. We’ve bonded and worked together to get ourselves through these weeks, living in what may be the world’s largest sociological experiment – a Petri dish the size of a medium sized country. Our building residents have become a tribe.

And how quickly we reverted. Facing lockdown and a collapse in food delivery, we rapidly became hunter-gatherers, seeking out food wherever we could find it, negotiating to get it back to each of our “caves,” inside a vertical warren of them, sharing tips and collaborating with other tribe members.”

–Shanghai lockdown diary