Your First Sound Art Work, and Why It's Allowed to Be Weird: Module 2

Hey! I'd love to hear your thoughts, send me a voice note.There is a recording of a marsquake sitting on NASA's website, free, waiting for somebody to do something with it. That is where you are this week: standing in front of more sound than you could use in ten lifetimes, about to reach in and make something.This is the audio lecture for the second module. We start with the tool itself, the DAW: what it actually does, and where it came from. Reel-to-reel tape, razor blades, and a handful of artists in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s who looked at a machine built to reproduce sound and decided to abuse it instead. That lineage runs in a straight line from Halim El-Dabh in 1944 Cairo, through Pierre Schaeffer and the idea of musique concrète, all the way to the sound you will drag across your screen this week.Along the way: where to find sounds you are actually allowed to use, one beautiful little idea about how continuous sound becomes numbers a computer can hold, and the assignment itself, Sonic Sketch 1, your first piece of sound art.The heart of it is a single move. Two sounds land against each other and do something neither one was doing alone. That is the whole art form, and everything else this semester is a variation on it. This week the making matters more than the made thing, so make something honest instead of something safe.Required listening: Halim El-Dabh, Wire Recorder Piece (1944), and Pierre Schaeffer, Étude aux chemins de fer (1948).Pairs with the Module 2 pages, screencasts, and the Pro Tools install guide in the course.