When not playing Junior Scrabble with Stavroula yesterday, I was hatching plans. With Stav, the focus was on the exciting, forthcoming Love Is Awesome exhibition, also involving Emmylou and Rachael Matthews. With my supervisor, I was working on another new project.

Many plots are afoot…

The new project is to be a sonic advent calendar, the first experiment in a new, collaborative venture called the Sound Diaries project. From 1st December, visitors to the (still being made) project blog will be able to hear a sound captured on that day, in the run-up to Christmas.

I am interested in this idea, and in how sounds are generally experienced in blogland. I think a lot of people read blogs at work, so sound isn’t always a welcome addition to a post… but also I think that we don’t really know what to say about sounds when compared, say, to images. And I like the idea that experimental sound projects needn’t be focussed around concert halls and recitals; that they can be as simple and as straightforward as posting up mp3s recorded from daily life and sharing them through a popular format like the Internet…

I am also interested in the slippage between sound/image, and the idea that sounds can be used like sonic snapshots with the same level of reference and documentation as photographs. But I also think that every sound project needs a visual component also, to communicate on the two levels.

I am therefore currently hunting out images which suggest the idea of sound and the idea of christmas. I haven’t gotten very far in this search, but any suggestions you have for potential sound images that I could create or photograph would be most welcome.