Week 4: Sound, Wellbeing and Disability Representation

I apologised for not getting my random page but my words on the book were fixed with my topic. I supposed food is always one of the most significant thing to consider about. I’ve got milk, cheese, bagel, kitchen, chicken, cooking. I found they are quite warm.

ways of listening: Causal listening/Semantic listening/Reduced Listening

I will apply causal listening and semantic listening in my audio paper: I am a bio language artist and I find sometimes applying some verbs in Chinese will make the audio paper taste a bit like a sweet home. I would like to record the field recordings of how I cook and how I bake food.

Some of the most affecting recordings render the feeling of domestic stasis and paralysis plaguing those not on the frontlines of essential work. While media artist Stephen Cornford’s austere piece a state of enclosure amplifies the dull hum of central heating, texturing it with the tense scraping of piano strings, musician Choi Joonyong’s wonderfully deadpan Washing Machine captures the percussive racket of ping-pong balls tumbling in the titular appliance. Musician and sound artist Heather Frasch’s The sound of objects helps me remember is a scintillating cloud of clicks, clinks, and rattles— the sonic textures, her accompanying photograph suggests, of various items around the house, including a pair of scissors, a pinecone, and an Illy coffee container. It’s a performance of a text score that prompts the participant (who, in the recording, is also the composer) to “reflect on objects, texts and sounds that remind us of our past selves.” Frasch notes that, given the uncertainty of the present, the past is more comforting than the future. As of my writing, Amplify 2020’s collection numbers 150 recordings. In its generous excess, it offers not so much a distraction as a space for extended meditation on present conditions.

Protest of Chinese Lockdown

Numbers 2228, 2230, and 2232 decided to hold a “serious art exhibition” on the third day of their isolation in the double oriental cabin in Deyang, Sichuan.
The people represented by the three strings of numbers are Meng Lichao, Chen Yu and Yang Yang. The three post-90s artists originally went to Deyang to participate in the Jingyang Art Festival. On November 8, because a person infected with the new crown virus appeared in the hotel where they stayed, the three of them were arrested. Those who were judged as close contacts were sent to the shelter for centralized isolation and missed the opening ceremony of the art festival.
During the “5+3” isolation period, three artists, each in a room of less than 20 square meters, worked on their works and fought against boredom. Meng Lichao bought brushes and paper through takeaways, and while listening to rock music, he painted graffiti all over the walls, ceilings, and frosted glass in the bathroom. Chen Yu saved the boiled eggs for breakfast and used computer 3D modeling software to simulate the “beetle” who was born in the isolation room and was at a loss. Yang Yang collected mineral water bottles, the outer packaging of instant noodles in buckets, and plastic bags of medical waste, and put together a huge “kaleidoscope” on the wall.

Evaluation of Arts based Courses within a UK Recovery College for People with Mental Health Challenges –Joanna Stevens, Catherine Butterfield, Adrian Whittington, and Sue Holttum

A 2017 UK parliamentary enquiry on Arts, Health and Wellbeing [1] (p. 34) identified, “An expanding body of evidence to support the contention that the arts have an important contribution to make to health and wellbeing.” The inquiry noted positive contributions in a range of areas including “aging, long term conditions, loneliness and mental health” [1] (p. 4), but also the need for further research. In relation to mental health and recovery, research suggests that participatory arts activities can increase people’s sense of hope, meaning and identity [2], and confidence, connectedness and empowerment [2,3]. Some studies have reported that arts activities and their community context were experienced as a welcome change from a mental health service environment and its focus on illness, and that new creativity and an artistic identity could be forged [2–4].

“Historically, soundscapes have been investigated in the context of the deleterious effects of noise (17). Natural soundscapes play a central role in urban environmental sustainability because they offer reduced exposure to adverse effects of noise to which urban populations are highly exposed (18). Natural sounds have also been recognized for their ability to mask noise (19), their improvement of perceived park soundscape quality and park experience (20), their ability to enhance perceptions of the built environment (21), and their capacity for psychological restoration (22). Thus, research increasingly focuses on evaluating the characteristics of soundscapes by quantifying their different components (23) to manage soundscapes as a natural resource (24).”

A synthesis of health benefits of natural sounds and their distribution in national parks

Rachel T. Buxton, Amber L. Pearson, Claudia Allou, Kurt Fristrup,

Disability Representation

“The implication of that is that since all sounds are equal, all performers are equal and there’s no sound that’s any better than any other. Therefore, I could regard my speech, for example, the fact that I’m a stutterer, and that in my personal life has always been a source of anxiety, because stutters are thought of as distortions of normal speech, but you… I could now regard the stutters as sounds as good as any other sounds.”

Alvin Lucier – Paik, Nam June. A Tribute to John Cage

• what is the specific aspect of your audio paper at the moment in terms of “wellbeing”?
• I suppose eating disorder is one of the focus I would like to write about on my audio paper. I would like to listen to people’s ideas and protest of eating disorder:D
• describe shortly the qualities of the environments your presentation will listen to (e.g. hi-fi, lo-fi,“natural”, man-made, silent, vociferous)
• natural
• What inherent or explicit references to the past 18 months of pandemic listening are informing your audio paper research?
• As I said, Shanghai was still having lockdown issues so I would definitely bring about the issue on food stock in china.