Project 6: How to Kiss
The idea behind "How to Kiss" came from Marshall McLuhan's quote "We can't shut out sound automatically. We simply are not equipped with earlids." I know I've probably beaten the trash thing to death already, but we hear a lot of garbage. Garbage noise. We hear toilets flushing several times a day. We hear obnoxious laughter coming from our own mouths. We do hear pretty music, and we have more and more control over what we hear with the invention of things like noise cancelling headphones, which are primarily meant to shut out all the garbage noise. But it's still there, all around us, in waves. Ugly noises that in waves on paper or computer bits on a monitor look pretty much the same as every other wave or bit.
"Everyone is in the best seat" says John Cage. Especially if that seat is the toilet. Red velvet seats in an opera house are far less comfortable, depending on your corporeal needs.
The beeps in "How to Kiss" are representative of the machines that control pretty much everything, starting and stopping every aspect of our lives, letting us in and out of physical space, controlling what we hear. Just ignore them, please.
"What is the robot voice? Why is it telling me how to kiss? I know how to kiss better than a disembodied fake voice made of electronic signals, don't I?" These are the questions you may ask after listening to "How to Kiss." I have no answer. Do you?
Noah, what I found most fascinating about this piece is just how crisp the sound is. The quality of sound is just incredible and very immersive in just how ominous and grounded it is. It is almost haunting with the mechanical whirling and chirping from the occult machine that we the listeners obviously cannot see but can only imagine as being large, obtrusive, and incredibly efficient to a fault. I understand and can envision how the monotonous sounds coming from the machine represent a repression on our lives made by technology we created that facilitates a new order that is now more easily manipulated. We as majority do not look back a knowledge passed down from one generation to next on something as elementary as "how to kiss," but rather we rely on answers provided to us by contextualized and simplified knowledge gathered in our technologies, making the process of learning more "mechanical" and automatic rather than personalized and challenging.
ReplyDeleteI love this. Obnoxious sounds somehow turned into something poetic. Still gross, though. I like how the sounds overlap and keep going on longer than they would in real life. It forces us to think about the little noises that we hear all the time, get annoyed at for a second, and then forget about because it happened so quickly.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Michael that the sounds are all remarkably crisp and recognizable, but the consistent white noise or room tone in the background makes it into a cohesive texture– It's a funny contrast with the cryptic, almost aggressive description that makes it seem like you're writing as John Cage or McLuhan himself.
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