SOUND ART︎
Backyard Barbecue
2021
sound piece
2021
sound piece
click here to listen
I set out to try and recreate a nostalgic feeling of being a child on summer vacation, basing my sound piece off of this paragraph:
It’s a warm summer evening, you fell asleep in the middle of the day because there’s nothing else to do. You wake up and your head is foggy. Everything feels like a dream still. Your parents invited their friends over. You can hear them all in the backyard from your bedroom. The sun is setting so you can hear the low hum of mosquitos and crickets. Your dad and a few others are watching burgers on the grill. Your mom is sitting around the table gossiping with her friends. The speaker is playing your parent’s favorite music. On one side of the fence, you hear your neighbors doing cannonballs in their pool. In the distance, you hear someone mowing their lawn. People are walking their dogs on the street. Your mom calls for you from downstairs and lets you know that dinner is ready
I set out to try and recreate a nostalgic feeling of being a child on summer vacation, basing my sound piece off of this paragraph:
It’s a warm summer evening, you fell asleep in the middle of the day because there’s nothing else to do. You wake up and your head is foggy. Everything feels like a dream still. Your parents invited their friends over. You can hear them all in the backyard from your bedroom. The sun is setting so you can hear the low hum of mosquitos and crickets. Your dad and a few others are watching burgers on the grill. Your mom is sitting around the table gossiping with her friends. The speaker is playing your parent’s favorite music. On one side of the fence, you hear your neighbors doing cannonballs in their pool. In the distance, you hear someone mowing their lawn. People are walking their dogs on the street. Your mom calls for you from downstairs and lets you know that dinner is ready
I felt the desire to make a summer scene because I was feeling mentally exhausted by schoolwork and the COVID-19 pandemic. I was longing for a time where I felt truly free. I immediately thought of childhood and summer vacation. In this piece, I wanted to create the feeling of a childhood memory. At the same time, I wanted to challenge the perception of memory by adding fantastical elements to mimic a child’s imagination while at the same time questioning our definition of “accurate” memory. Backyard Barbecue tackled the idea of perception by creating false memory, an amalgamation of childhood memories and sounds associated with summer vacation. As we get older it becomes harder to trust our own memories. Every time we re-tell a story we add and drop details, and that affects the details of the next time we recall that memory. This piece uses pop-culture references from my own childhood, However, I hope that this transports its listeners back to the simpler, carefree years of childhood. My piece borrows from soundtracks of early 2000s children’s media, such as The Legend of Zelda, Spirited away, Avatar: The Last Airbender, and H20: Just add water. But it also samples music from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s in order to recreate time spent with my parents and their friends, Such as Country roads, HAL 9000, and the Nintendo NES, in order to create an entry point for older generations of listeners to relate to. I was heavily influenced by the soundscape and POV community on youtube, where people upload edits of songs that transport the viewer to a specific place. Listening to these audios feels like a real memory even though the scenario may have never happened to me. An important editing technique to this piece was experimenting with the fade-out effects and learning how to determine which direction a noise is coming form. To me, they reflect this idea of childhood memories becoming fainter and fainter the farther we get away from them.
