Author: Junyi Jiang

Spoken Word

Found Sound

New music

I don’t know what I am going to do at first.

So as the task demands, I made a Consider-all-Factor-style brainstorming.

I did a huge concept challenge mindmap, and gave birth to some really crazy ideas.

I always had some crazy ideas when I was doing my portfolio used to apply for UAL’s offer, and because there is time, I always could somehow make that happen, either asking others for help, or do all of those things on my own with my day and night in it……

but soon its becoming clear to me, that this time there will be no more miracle, and there are things that even with all my effort in it I still wouldn’t make that happen, so I started to look to some simple ideas.

a workshop of collage gave me a simple idea on this.

This pic of my process suddenly reminds me of one rhythmic game I played recently, called pianist.

I thought that it would be a good idea to change those dropping notes into letters, and combine with the sound wave of the three different music, but then I visited academic support once, then I realize that that’s not what I really want to do. One quote I remember from Mrs. Rachael Finney is that as an artist you must find out what this attracts you as an artist.

That day I went back home by bus, and on the way home, an idea suddenly came to me, which was inspired by this video that the academic support teacher showed me:

“Spoken word” is the one that I am most worried about, but now it seemed that I thought things to narrowed. Spoken word doesn’t just include poems and dramas, but also like this. I start to wonder what is the relationship between sounds and body movements, and what body movement would make people connect to a sound because that is probably the key to the three different music festivals. If I could only present those sounds in a visual way, how could I connect the visuals to the sounds?

I surfed the internat and watched massive videos on the three topics, and finally I decided to link the body parts to the three music festivals. I linked the mouth to spoken words, hands to found sound, because I saw many found sound artists using their hand to interact with an item to produce sounds, since they can’t use force to make things move and collide and make sound out of that, there must be something to do with hand while producing the found sound music piece.

As for New music, I want to link the whole body to it, because dancing needs the whole body. But I still don’t know if I am using the movement of the whole body or only the legs to represent it.

Anyway I started a research, hoping to find out answers to those problems above.

That day I worked out a video questionaire, or something more like an activity.

I chose 19 sounds from Garageband, and first let the candidates to use mouth to imitate those sounds, then let the candidates to use hand gestures to express the sound in their way, at last, I picked 5 pieces of music that are newly released, and let then dance with the rhythm anyway they like.

and I started investigation.

so far I got some really useful responses, and I faced some difficulties. Maybe some people are less sensitive to the sounds, so that their imitation to the sounds are less accurate, and they intend to use only one word to represent all the sounds: some are “B” lovers, some are”ern” lovers, some are “D” lovers, which makes me finding a kind of, for example, a mouth shape to make all people relate to a specific sound is really kind of difficult, but, then I decided to use premiere to sort people’s different responces toward one sound like this:

I found that though the word they used to say like “beeee/deeee/ernnnn” is quite different, the mouth shapes are really close!

Now I am working on sorting out the spoken word part, and I hope that I won’t need to collect more samples to work out a outcome.

On my scratch paper, I sorted out some voices that the candidates have shown similarity in imitating those.

From left to right, first one is the voice of drum, voice of guitar(boeing~~), voice of electric guitar, voice of ascending electric guitar, high pitch violin and Chinese drum.

I have drawn a skectch of animation of the first “ba!” voice, adjusted the length of each scene,

in the end it looked like something like this.

I felt kinda satisfied bout this scratch? and I would proceed. About the style of drawing, I remembered Andy warhol’s Marylyn Monroe, and I decided to take a look into this style. Because that lip was too sexy(stop