Homework 7.1. Tell Me.

This was a challenging project for me, as I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do or say with the track that I created. Music is not my particular strong suit, and I was intimidated by creating something for others to hear, though I am often quite comfortable creating things for people to see and read.

However, as I was going through the sounds that I recorded for this project, I also saw, within my recordings, a set of interviews that I had conducted with high school students, each of which began with me asking the students to tell me a little bit about themselves. From that point, I decided that I wanted this project to be an abstracted self-introduction, a layering of sounds that might tell the listener a little bit about me, though in more abstracted and non-direct terms.

To that end, I included sounds of my day, sounds that I hear during my commutes or during my job, outside as I walk around, sounds of New York City, and the voices of people in my life. I layered each of these sounds together, trying to find a point between comfort and discomfort, which is where I found myself while completing this project.

At the end, the sound kind of heightens into nothing, and rushes to a close; there is so much more to say, there is so much more to know about me. With this one project, this one small answer to such a large question, how could you know everything? It would be overwhelming, as is the end of this piece.

I think if I were to do this piece again, or push this further, I would want to pursue more of the sounds of voices, of oral history, of verbal exchanges between people to tell the story. For this piece, I used more ambient sounds to develop the audio track. However, I was also listening to some of the interviews that I conducted and voicemails that people left me, and was moved by the sounds of people's voices as they explained who they were, as they expressed things like love and fear and joy and worry. Similar to the Story Core project, I think there is so much to be said with people's words and tones, and throughout the exploration of this subject, found myself increasingly drawn to this aspect.