A sound piece made with Regina Cantu de Alba and inspired by Octavia Butler’s short story “Bloodchild.”

With this project, I learned to strip away the pictures that I’m so comfortable with and concentrate on tones and sounds that me and my partner recorded and later edited in Adobe Audition. I used to listen to lots of audio books with my eyes closed and would fall asleep to them. It’s an experience to focus solely on the sounds and to let the blank visual canvas of your mind wander away. And that’s hard to do nowadays when everyone is so plugged into their smart phones and social media.

Listening to the sound piece in the dark with the rest of the class and hearing the feedback was interesting. I definitely was influenced by the sound walk and Pejk Malinovski’s talk. I loved how the sounds took me on a journey and that’s what our intention was with the piece. Collaboration with Lola was also a big pleasure. Her initial interpretation of the story as ‘points of entry vs. the expected’ was our base for the emotional values that we collected in our sounds. And the freedom for both of us to explore and experiment in sound collecting and editing separately was good in combining different perspectives. Then later coming back together to combine our finds and discover things together, like recording interesting sounds in the stairwell with specials mics and chia pudding. This was all key to making a piece that we’re both happy with.

A lesson that I will take for the next sound project is to bring some sort of buffer on the Zoom to cancel out the wind when recording outside or to just take a stick mic instead for cleaner sounds with less distortion.