1. Number every one of the 60 pages in the journal.
   Number on the bottom corners of the pages (see above)
   Use either pencil or ballpoint (other kinds of markers and pens will bleed through!)
   The pages have a tendency to stick together so be sure to check that you aren’t skipping pages. 

2. Using pages 2 and 3, write about the following:
   What is the first sound you can remember?
   What is a sound from your childhood that is important to you?
   Describe it. Why is it important?

Remembering a sound is difficult. When we want to remember a sound we can
readily describe what we felt or where we heard the sound. How it looked like.
But when asked to hear that sound again, to recreate it in our head, things
become more difficult. When asked to remember something it’s relatively easy to
close our eyes and picture the situation. Not so when asked to recall a certain
sound. Could it be because our auditory awareness is less subject to cognitive
structuring than our visual perceptions? Because auditory perceptions are more
direct, less maleable by our pre‐existing mindsets?

Stijn Demeulenaere
Introduction to the project Soundtracks

Background:
We are not necessarily accustomed to drawing sound memories out of our heads. We are more likely to recall sounds when we hear things that trigger a recollection. Sound evokes memories much in a manner similar to smell, there are some odors that bring you immediately back to childhood. This effect is called anamnesis:

Anamnesis, an evocation of the past, refers to situations in which a sound or a sonic context revives a situation or an atmosphere of the past … The particular timbre of a voice recalls a specific person; a certain song allows one to revisit a day in the past; a particular ambiance evokes memories of years past. Thanks to sound, a forgotten moment of your life is restored. Not only is this sound remembered, but all the other sensorial and affective components also cross the threshold of consciousness. All the senses may act as stimuli of anamnesis; sight, taste and smell as much as hearing.

Sonic Experience: A Guide to Everyday Sounds
Jean-Francois Augoyard and Henri Torgue

How to get started:
How do you recall a sound from your past? It may just come to you immediately, but if not, consider strategies such as these to stir up your memory:

• think of an important place from your childhood. is there a sound associated with it?
• think of an person that was important to you in some way when you were little. Is there a sound associated with this person?
• think of an event

Reference:
Stijn Demeulenaere
Soundtracks

Use Pages 8 – 11 in your sound journal
to enter notes, observations and data collected during your listening visits on 5th avenue.

no these are NOT Parsons students.

Use Pages 16 – 19 in your Sound Journal
Sound can be encountered with your ears, but it can also be felt as physical vibrations in the body.
This week, be aware of the impact that sounds have around you.

• Describe one or two experiences. How did they feel?
  Use whatever technique best describes the sensations that you felt.
• Draw an image that corresponds with your description of this experience

Tremulously I stand in the subways, absorbed into the terrible reverberations of exploding energy. Fearful, I touch the forest of steel girders loud with the thunder of oncoming trains that shoot past me like projectiles. Inert I stand, riveted in my place. My limbs, paralyzed, refuse to obey the will insistent on haste to board the train while the lightning steed is leashed and its reeling speed checked for a moment.

- Helen Keller, From My Later Life

Use pages 24 and 25 in your sound journal
This week, spend some time looking for silence.
What do you observe?

Here are some questions to consider:

• How do you describe silence?
• What does silence mean to you?
• Can you remember silence in your past?
• What did you observe in NYC? Were you able to find silence?
• Try your earplugs. Describe.
• can you draw some of these ideas?

I tried to stay absolutely still for as long as possible, to see if I could hear anything at all. I listened and listened. I held my breath and listened again. I had a queer feeling that the whole wood was listening with me, the trees and the bushes, the little animals hiding in the undergrowth and the birds roosting in the branches. All were listening. Even the silence was listening.

Roald Dahl
Danny Champion of the world

It was after I got to Boston that I went into the anechoic chamber at Harvard University.  Anyway, in that silent room I heard two sounds: one high and one low.  Afterward, I asked the engineer in charge, ‘Why, if the room was so silent, I had heard two sounds?’  He said, ‘The high one was your nervous system in operation.  The low one was your blood in circulation.

- John Cage, Indeterminacy

Use pagess 30 – 33 in your sound journal
Consider all of the listening you have done so far.
Use these pages to reflect and repond.

ONLINE SOUNDJOURNAL ENTRY

Listen to the Weekly Listening (Philip Samartzis).
Rather than a faithful capturing of one place in time, Samartzis carefully constructs communicate the sounds he captures to create an evocative portrait of a place, in this case, Venice Italy. Create an image that responds to this audio piece.

1. NO TEXT
2. Image should be a drawing
3. Black and white + 1 color
4. image should be scanned and then uploaded, not photographed!
5. add to Tumblr as an IMAGE POST
6. title: “Drawing venice – your name”

What do sounds look like?
A simple answer is the basic wave form, a graphic visualization of the amplitude (or volume) of a sound something familiar to you from digital music-players and representations of sound in science fiction and action films.

Creative License

How do artists and designers represent sound?
Here are a few images from an ad campaign for the company Phonak that makes hearing aids.
They are costumes meant to represent certain sounds. They bear a striking resemblance to Nick Cave’s sound suits.

the sound of birds twittering

the sound of paper rustling

There’s also a tradition of artists attempting to visualize sounds

Wassily Kandinsky’s 1913 Composition VII

Moth and the Thunderclap - Charles Burchfield, 1961

What about composers that use graphic notation in a to guide the performance of their work?
Graphic notation is an unconventional form of musical notation in which the musical composition is written using graphic elements that tend to be foreign to traditional written music.
These visual scores suggest a lot about how a piece might sound.

Mass Black Implosion by Iannis Xenakis:

John Cage - Fontana Mix

Use pages 46 – 49 in your Sound Journal

Sound Journal – Reflective journal
consider the projects, collaborative work, and journal writing you have done in this course.
Write (legibly!) about the relationship of these projects. What are the ideas and activities that tie them together?
Consider them in relation to the learning outcomes for this course:

1. Team work and collaboration
1.1- the ability to collaborate by participating and communicating as part of a team.
1.2- the capacity to manage tasks in ways that support other team members and the goals of the project.
1.3- an understanding of tools for self-assessment within a team.
1.4- the versatility to react and adapt to the complexities of team dynamics.
1.5- a practice of responsible, engaged and informed critique as an individual and as part of a team.

2. Project Management
2.1- the ability to manage the creative process from brainstorming and idea development through research/data
collection, analysis, and editing.
2.2- an understanding of time and resource constraints as part of the process; an ability to pace a project schedule as a non-linear progression.
2.3- the flexibility to experiment, change direction and take risks, working through / past failure.
2.4- the ability to develop problem-setting and –solving skills using critical exploration and innovative / creative
approaches to project realization.

3. Process: Engagement, persistence and reflection
3.1- the ability to develop insights by engaging with a topic and collecting and analyzing data.
3.2- an ability to develop and deploy an array of creative strategies, methods, and research techniques
3.3- an understanding of iterative prototyping to test and refine one’s proposals

4. Importing/Applying Skills
4.1- the ability to implement formal craft skills and draw upon materials, tools and techniques from other
foundation courses in a manner that appropriately reflects and communicates intent.
4.2- a conceptual understanding of how and where to critically apply those skills and methods.

5. Critical Reading and Writing
5.1- the ability to integrate critical thinking through reading, writing and discussion within the studio practice.
5.2- the ability to articulate design arguments that are analytical and innovative.
5.3- versatility with effective communication skills that express a position, perspective or
point of view.