Art's Birthday

For my celebration of Art's Birthday, I was inspired by the idea of "exchange and telecommunications-art." In keeping with the course idea of soundscapes and how we are surrounded by music, I decided to record a brief improvisation using a phone. I took the dial tone, busy signal and operator's voice as musical material. I recorded these first, and then did some cut and paste, multi-tracking and ran some of these sounds through effects like compression, EQ, delay and reverb. I even attempted some phasing!

The premise of this piece is really the futility of communication and social interaction. The presence of the busy signal emphasizes how lines are so often busy and how channels of communication – even socially, and not through a phone – are often so inhibited by emotion, tension, hate, etc. I fear with the rise of technology, we often neglect real face to face communication and replace this with phones, text messaging, blogs, MSN and all of those social utilities the Internet has created for us. When this escalates, we link our self-worth and self-identity to how others see us through false facades such as the Internet. The screen, or the speaker in a phone is not where life happens, but if we allow technology to strip us of basic human interaction, we enter a life that is portrayed in this recording: a life of busy signals, dial tones and the futile dialing trying to get past the operator.

Happy Birthday to Art who tries to keep creativity and interaction alive.

http://www.willderness.ca/art.mp3