The Domestic Soundscape

Last year around the end of October I created the stationery for my SOUND BANK project. To do this, I screenprinted SOUND BANK onto 365 glassine envelopes along with space for the date, a title and a record number. Then I created for each envelope a letterpress-printed card on which to record (by means of words, drawings or conventional notation) sounds heard throughout each day.

The project has been mostly successful but there are some notable gaps in the year’s SOUND BANK records where I lost heart with it or was just too busy working on something else to contribute a SOUND RECORD to the BANK for future reference. There are also some anomalous records scattered throughout the year – notably from the project’s brief tenure in Love is Awesome – where a special edition was created for the visiting public to fill out and I learned that the intended use for my custom-built stationery was not as self-explanatory as I had assumed.

This is some of the clearest feedback I have ever received.

I had been feeling bad about the fact that my intended, continuous creation of the SOUND BANK archive was not as consistent as I had originally hoped it to be, but then when I revisited my posts from around October 2008, I rediscovered Celia Pym’s marvellous darning and thought ‘why don’t I darn the SOUND BANK during 2010?’ So that is my hope; to fill in the gaps that exist in the SOUND BANK, to augment the archive, to try presenting it at various exhibitions in new ways, and to develop it as a tool for recording sounds.

Celia Pym’s fantastic darning which I saw for myself around this time last year, when I was making the SOUND BANK.

In the meantime, I am happy to report that December 2008 saw me studiously filling out the SOUND BANK every day, so I have found myself digging out the sealed envelopes from that time and shall be revealing their contents throughout the month of December 2009. I hope you will enjoy opening these envelopes with me and examining the contents…

Today’s sound is a squeaky plate.

I don’t know what we were eating but it must have been tasty for me to get to discover the squeaky sound of my plate. The text on my record reads;

Many different tones resulted from my dipping my fingers in the sauce on my plate and licking them clean.

I hope you are celebrating the beginning of Advent with something equally delicious.

If you want to plug in your headphones and experience some sounds recorded in a different way, you can hop over to the sound-diaries website where Paul Whitty and myself will be taking it turns to bring you more sonic joy in a new edition of last year’s sonic advent calendar. As before, each ‘door’ will reveal 24 seconds of sound from that exact day.

Tags: archive, details, drawings, glassine envelope, handmade, Letterpress, making notes, mundane, notation, notes, Recording, representations, screenprint, Sound Bank, SOUNDBANK, sounds

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 at 3:27 pm and is filed under Art projects, Listening, Making, Valuing Reality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.