Intro to Sound Art

The Danger of a single Story

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This is my third time rewatching this TED talk, how much I loved listening to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

That when we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.

It is exciting and sad at the same time to know that everything we know about something is usually "just a single story". We get to hear stories about one side and then another, but with time there is a completely different side that we discover but never knew it would exist.

The first time I listened to the TED talk, it motivated me to stay objective and try to listen to both sides before making my own conclusion. In many cases, I would come to the conclusion that it is better not to make any conclusion at all but just wait and listen to more stories!

I am Vietnamese, born and raised in Ukraine, the country where only 0.0001% of the population is Asian. I still remember the time when my classmates at the University met me for the first time. When I told them I was Vietnamese but I speak Russian and Ukrainian because I grew up here, they asked "Can you cook dog meat?!". It is so funny that my experience was so similar to Chimamanda's. I could not blame them for not knowing but I couldn't help but feel a little sad –– how many people would have to tell that single story for other people to actually believe in it so seriously?

I completely agree, stories matter, and one of the biggest challenge that we face as storytellers is how do we tell the stories so that they can be as less biased as possible? Is it even possible? This is the question I ask myself everyday, even when I am not planning to tell any story. Is the story I just heard biased? How can I get another side of the story?

Sound Collage

After coming to New York City I started to miss my old little piano at home a lot. I still don't have the chance to practice piano yet because of all the homework so I decided to create a sound collage that would tell a story of a beginner performance pianist. His skills are pretty good but this is the first time he is on the stage and very nervous.

P.S. I could not upload it on SoundCloud because it kept throwing an error, so I uploaded it on clyp.it instead.

For this sound collage, I used 6 different sounds, 5 of them I downloaded on freesound.org and the piano performance was found on the Free Music Archive website. By the way, the piece is called Ballade No. 3, written by Chopin, played by Nico de Napoli. I mixed and edited everything in the Adobe Audition, I also tried to add the revered effect for the coughing to create an effect like this is the piano hall. Although, I feel like I still could not manage to fill in the gaps between the different tracks so that the collage sounded more natural but it just means I have so much to learn!