Doing my second Soundscapes project was as bit of a struggle. I came up with a number of ideas, attempted to carry out a few of them, and got a good ways into working on three different options that didn’t pan out. They didn’t just take different shapes than I was expecting—they pretty much fell apart.

Under the best of circumstances schoolwork, particularly if it has a creative aspect, causes me some anxiety. But after my third attempt at a project failed to cohere into anything I could imagine presenting to my class, it really got to me. For a while I just felt paralyzed.

I got in touch with Sandy about it and she helped me realize I needed to take a step back. Then a funny thing happened. When I took a step back, I got some perspective on my paralysis, but I also realized that I could do a project that meant something to me if I stepped back into that experience and made something from that perspective. Once I had that idea, I saw how much more connected I was to this project idea than I had been to the others. I realized that even if they had worked out, I wouldn’t have felt very good about them because they were just ideas that sounded clever enough for an assignment, not ideas that really felt important.

All the other projects seemed like they went nowhere, and in a sense they did. But they did lead me to an important realization and to a project that, while I can see ways I might have done it better and ways it could be pursued further or refined, I can actually feel pretty good about. Though that’s kind of paradoxical since it’s not really a “feel good” project.

I used a AKG C-1000S microphone through a Presonus Firepod interface hooked into a Powerbook G4 to record my voice. I spoke (extemporaneously, otherwise I knew the result would sound phoney) for a little over sixteen minutes about what had happened with my initial project attempts, how I reacted, and from there, about the sorts of fears I have that not only got in the way of this project but of so many other things I’ve tried to do in my life.

I then took the resulting recording and altered it using Ableton Live, chopped it up using Peak Pro 5, and edited the pieces together and made further changes to the sound using Logic Express. The resulting 2 1/2 minute piece layers different snippets of my own voice with varying degrees of distortion, creating a tense, somewhat claustrophobic atmosphere with significant phrases, some fairly clear, others difficult to understand but still somewhat intelligible, coming to the surface.

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