12 Sounds
An Sangwook
According to Luminate, a U.S.-based music database company, 120,000 new songs are added to global streaming sites every day. If you include the various commercial and non-commercial sources that aren't officially counted, the number of music we hear today is much higher. If you expand the scope of music to include environmental sounds and noises, the number becomes astronomical. The attempt to incorporate sounds that were once thought to be musically intractable due to their irregular periodicity into the world of music has been ongoing since the early 20th century and can be found not only in the realm of contemporary music and sound art, but also in popular music. Today, we live in a world overloaded with music and sound.
In a world full of sound, what sounds should we listen to, or what sounds can we make? Anyone who's ever worked with music on a computer has probably had to pause for a moment in front of the plethora of instruments and vast sample libraries to choose from. Electronic music companies promote endless options as unlimited creativity and freedom, but too much choice can be exhausting for creators. The same is true for listeners. We feel fatigue when there are too many sounds around us. Several methods have been developed to offset this fatigue, such as repeating familiar favorites (AI algorithmic recommendations) or completely blocking out sounds we don't want to hear (noise canceling).
12 Sounds was born out of sound fatigue. After spending a long time listening to and making music, I decided to listen more carefully without repeating familiar sounds or blocking out the ones I didn't want to hear. Starting point was meeting and listening to musicians who are making musics in the same time zone as the author. And, I asked them what they heard and what they were thinking about. The interviews were conducted in a field recording setting that assumed each musician as a single location. As a result, the author received a set of “sounds that are important to each musician” in addition to the interview recordings.
Sounds received were assigned to 12 speakers. Each speaker is linked to an interview with the person who delivered the sound via a QR code. I hoped to connect the sounds that people might have heard somewhere when analyzed only as physical waveforms to the life and times of specific people. The sounds then become the material for the sounds I can use. I didn't know in advance what sounds they would convey, but they described the era I was in, conditioned the limits of what I could sound like, and relieved my fatigue.
The twelve sounds are interwoven, connected, and sometimes dissonant, creating a virtual soundscape , which is a contemporary mixture of non-contemporaneous elements that we each struggle with. The mixed sounds may also resemble sounds we have heard somewhere, and we may feel fatigued again by the difficulty or familiarity of the sounds. I hope that we will not close our ears in that fatigue, and that we will find precious sounds in our memories that are meaningful to us all.
Sound & Interview
Kwon Byungjun
Quandol
Nam Meari
Park Kyungso
Park Minhee
Yoo Hong
Lee Taehoon
Jung Jungyeop
Cho Eunhee
Choi Uzong
haihm
Haedong