Stressful Stimulation: A Sonic Exercise in Memory and Attention

The title of my video makes this final project sound like a game, and that is certainly one way of approaching my topic. However, I originally set out to convey the intense anxiety that can result from cluttered, confusing or overstimulating environments. Not to be taken lightly (There are whole books written about this stuff!), harmful soundscapes can definitely affect the way a person interacts with a space, my example here being Grinnell College’s main dining hall. In this way, I think it would be good to view my video as a test for the listener, to see whether I succeed in simulating anxiety using various techniques. I would also prefer that the viewer pay attention to the relationship between familiar, unfamiliar, and distracting sounds as the video progresses. I am telling more than just one story with this project, and sometimes as many as three stories at once.

Process: I took sound samples from the dining hall, interviewed random students about violent things that have happened to them and asked them to recount the sounds they heard when it happened, simulated some sounds by myself, and took a video recording of myself telling a story using sonic and visual vocabulary.

Here is an example of my work in CS6.

I combined these elements to create a video that hopefully tells more than one story, and elicits more than just a few emotions:

Here is my final video. (6 mins 20 seconds)

film still:

There are three main ideas that guided my work, and I attempted to synthesize them all in one video. I can’t yet tell if I succeeded, but here they are:

1. Getting to the bottom of why certain places on Grinnell campus are stressful as hell. In my proposal, I discussed this as the biggest idea behind my project: “…examining a key element of that anxiety: noise-related stress brought on by lack of control over our soundscapes here on campus. Taking a closer look at how we are masters and slaves of our sonic surroundings may help us pay attention to alternate sources (and solutions) to anxiety. One key area on campus that may be a source of tension is the dining hall.” So there you have it.

2. I was deeply inspired by the relationship between sound and memory, as introduced in our proto-project “sonic cinematic.” Part of this project hearkens back to my project for that unit, when I interviewed various students about sounds they remember from their childhood or hometown.

3. I wanted to find a way to tell stories that need to be heard in non-conventional ways. I have the most difficulty articulating this concept, out of all of them, because it relies on the premise that it cannot be explained with words. We tell stories to one another all the time, but what moved me was my tangential involvement with the Title IX activism and protests that began in October. I talked to so many different people about it (for journalism, friendship, and alliance) that it became in my head a long series of legalese, gossip and speculation. It was an enormous headache swimming in the words “talking about,” “heard” and “said.” So much of it was emotional that I began to wonder if stories would be more powerful if we used other senses to convey them. I set off on a quest to tell stories using auditory cues, e.g. talking about an event based on the senses we experienced at the time.

Additional themes:

Soundscape studies and listening walks. I found that these two items were the most influential on my experience of sound art in general, so I wanted to be part of a further examination of the details governing our daily sound walks (walking from place to place counts, whether or not we listen along the way). Since my first introduction to this idea, I have gradually become more attuned to my surroundings, and I want to convey that consciousness in this project.

Last, I realized as I was working on this video that I could have easily narrated it using my dining hall recordings as foley art. I intentionally shunned this idea because I was consciously avoiding combining sounds that made any sense. A key component in environmental anxiety (adrenaline and frustration) is confusion, so I wanted to make my video as confusing as possible while still making sense.

Unexpectedly, I ended up creating somewhat of an animal rights piece along the way. But that’s an unintended result that I am perfectly okay with keeping.

tl;dr Emotions are important when recounting experiences, so I wanted to tell a story that combined different emotive properties while attempting to simulate the sometimes anxiety-inducing soundscape in the dining hall. Listen for distractions, emotions, sonic cues and frustrating things. If you get bored, confused or annoyed with the video, that’s sort of the point but pay attention anyway.