Blog Post #2: What I Hear

Extra Credit

Texture in sound refers to the temp melodic and harmonic materials are combined in a composition. When I walked in around in New York City, there were many keynotes that made up the background textures where i was. There was soft wind rustling through the trees, and the city bus tires crackling against the gravel.I feel that this was the most integral sound to New York City because it's the city that never sleeps. New York City is a city that always running, so hearing bus tires against the gravel would be odd not to hear. Oddly enough I can also hear a plane in the distance passing by. I didnt really hear any cars either, probably because the neighborhood i was walking around in has a lot of bus stops in the area. Luckily, I was walking past a bus stop, and subtlety over the hum of the engine you can hear the doors creak open, and some footsteps too. This was only when it was really quiet, and quiet never happens in NYC. To my specific neighborhood, you will always hear screaming children because my neighbors in my apartment building have a lot of really, really young children. But it's always heard through walls, so it's just muffled laughter or crying, or sometimes both. I feel that these are sound signal and foreground sounds to my neighbors because the sounds have been occuring ever since I moved in to the apartment.

To Singapore, with Love Extra Credit

Firstly, I want to give my condolences to the filmmaker Tan Pin Pin for having her work banned. ( I also think the mentioned that she had her work banned once before.) You can tell that she poured her heart and soul into making this, because it takes much dedication and planning to even find the subjects that she is going to interview. Although you don't hear her much in the film, she has put so much care into the questions in order to fully humanize her subjects.  For example, one of the subjects, one of the subjects that stuck out to me was a former doctor who was exiled to London. It must have been blood sweat and tears to become a female doctor, and it meant absolutely nothing to the Singaporean government. And on top of that her husband dies, and her husband dies, and all she's left with is his ashes. And on top of all of that, there's a whole painful history tucked into that short clip, and she doesn't even cry!  Then, I thought about the title. I think what Tan Pin Pin wanted to ultimately demonstrate that what happened to these subjects is a lesson to the current Singapore-that history doesn't have to repeat itself. 

Define A Space

DefineASpaceFINAL from Monet Hicks on Vimeo.