Proposal for my Project “Sounds of Emily Carr”

  People observe the outside world through their senses. Though visual sense is often the most direct medium with which people perceive what is happening before their eyes, hearing also plays a vital role in helping people learn knowledge, interact with other people, and understand the outside world. In addition, in many cases, audio medium provides much more vivid and direct information than visual medium. For example, when we try to describe what a group of students are doing in an art class, presenting an artwork finished by the students is not enough. If we can present what is being discussed by the group of students on how they have tried to brainstorm, to plan, to outline, and finally to finish the artwork by their personal accounting through their voices, the effect will be much more attracting and profound.

Currently, as one of Canada’s premier post-secondary universities specializing in undergraduate and graduate art, design and media education, Emily Carr University is becoming more and more popular with many high school students wishing to pursue undergraduate studies in the areas of art, design and media education. In addition, parents of current Emily Carr students also hope to learn what their children are doing, how they pursue their academic studies, and how they fare outside classrooms in the university through medium other than visual images or verbal descriptions. Therefore, creating an audio project to introduce what Emily Carr students are doing currently  at the university either inside or outside the classrooms becomes an essential endeavour in the effort to let Emily Carr’s prospective students and parents of current Emily Carr’s students have a direct contact with what is happening in Emily Carr.

My project aims at describing what is happening at Emily Carr through audio information recorded by digital devices and then, the project will be uploaded to the Internet so that people around the world will be able to have access to this audio information and have a direct understanding of what is happening in this university. One of the features of this audio project is that it has no visual images, but just a black and white logo of Emily Carr University.

When the Internet surfer clicks on the logo, a black webpage will appear on the computer screen and the cursor will become a flashing ball. When viewers click on the black webpage, sounds of many classrooms will be heard. These sounds are very noisy. But as a matter of fact, those sounds are produced by different buttons which represent different classrooms and are invisible to the viewers. If viewers move the cursor to different buttons, different sounds from the buttons or classrooms will be produced. In addition, the position of the cursor in relation to the buttons around it may also determine the levels of the sounds. For example, if the cursor is located between Button A and Button B, a mix of the sounds from the two buttons will be produced, and the further the cursor is away from Button A but the nearer to Button B, the sound from Button A will be lower while the sound from Button B will be louder until the sound form Button A disappears completely when the cursor is completely out of the area of Button A.

The effect of these sounds is that they create such an intimate environment in which listeners feel as if they are virtually present in these classrooms, participating in the specific activities that are taking place in these classrooms. For example, when a button for a classroom is clicked, a group discussion in a classroom on topic that depicts the relationship between artwork and social unrest will be heard. Different students many be presenting different views on this topic. When a listener interested in this topic hears the discussion, he or she may feel a strong desire to participate in this group discussion simply because he or she has forgotten that she is just a listener far away from the group discussion. Instead, he or she feels strong empathy with other participants of the group discussion because he or she has regarded him/herself as an active participant of the group discussion. But if she or he is just presented with a photo of a classroom where students sit together, the viewer of the photo will never be able to have such a feeling of empathy, and he or she may never be interested in participating in such a classroom discussion since he or she has no information on the details of this topic.

In short, audio project should never be regarded as less important than a visual or verbal project. Since Mother Nature has granted human beings with such a wonderful sense, we should create opportunities to make full use of it so that audio projects created by us will enable us to make our world more harmonious and more peaceful to live.

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