December 7th to September 11th

click here to experience the wars

 

 

As I had stated in my proposal, my piece was based off the sound theories used in the work of artists such as Luigi Russolo and his friend Marinetti. My project uses the sounds of war to serve the same purpose as showing video footage or pictures of war. However, instead of using images to tell a story, I only use sounds to tell the story of war, while at the same time invoking the emotions of war in the listeners. My piece starts with World War 2. I chose to insert short song clips into each war to give a feeling of the time period it is, so that the listener can more easily identify what war is taking place. I then used short audio clips of leaders or icons of the time to also aid the listener is determining what war is being heard. Though these are very handy tools in determining what wars are taking place, the way I utilized sounds is the primary way to determine the war, even if there were no songs or voice clips.

 

For World War 2, I utilized the sounds of old warplanes, air raid sirens, older guns, and the atomic bomb. Then as I progressed to the Vietnam War I utilized helicopters, since whenever I have seen Vietnam movies or clips the one thing that always stands out is the constant use of helicopters. Then as I progressed into the Gulf War I knew that it needed to sound a lot more futuristic as opposed to previous wars. So I primarily utilized the sounds of fighter jets and guided missles and things of this nature. This war sounds a lot more fast-paced and intense, and since it was such a short war compared to the others, the brevity is felt in this portion of the clip. The final war I included was the war that was begun on September 11th. This war is obvious by the sounds since everyone is so recently familiar with this war. The sounds of planes crashing into the World Trade Center and the sounds of people screaming are some of the sounds I utilized here. I also used sounds of police cars and firetrucks to portray this event.

 

Overall, I was very pleased with the outcome of this project. I only encountered troubles at the beginning of my work, but I eventually resolved them. All of my sound files I had collected were recorded at different sample rates. Pro Tools did not recognize the different speeds of the sounds, and when I tried to insert them into my piece they all came out different speeds and caused major problems for me. Eventually I found a program that let me change the sample rate of all of my sounds to be the same. It took some time and was very tedious since I had collected about 45 different sounds, but it was the only way I could create my project and needed to be done. After this was completed, the creation of my project went very smoothly and I am very happy with the final outcome.