Sound Sculpture

Sounds from My Daily Practice

• Switch of the kettle
• Boiling the water
• Pouring water into the mug
• Opening the metal tea tin
• Mixing the tea with a spoon
• Drinking the tea

Textures from My Daily Practice

• Smooth metal of the kettle
• Smooth ceramic mug
• Dented metal tea tin
• Rough paper tag of the tea bag

Process

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The sound I used to create this sculpture is the sound of an electric kettle. The first to days of this project I was complete stuck. I had no idea how to recreate my sound. It was tricky because the sound the kettle make was always a low crackling sound instead of the sound of a low bubble of water.

To try to recreate the popping sound I knew I would have to have something hit against hard plastic. I had an old plastic container and gathered acorns, small pebbles, and rice to test the different sounds each of them made against the plastic. The acorns and pebbles were too heavy and created to loud of a noise as the rice made just the right sound.

Next I needed to overlap a crackling sound. I decided to wrap the outside of the container with a plastic bag so when it is held it produces the noise but not excessively. The texture of the plastic bags also shows how I visualized the texture of the sound.

To create the sound the object needs to be moved in a quick but smooth circle, while occasionally be given the slightest shake. I also pulled over a layer of plastic on top of the container. Then I poked hole to allow the grains of rice to fall through to create the popping sound as the sculpture is used. I created the lid to contain the rice as well as slightly muffle the sound to recreate the sound of the kettle.

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Below are some process picture of my sound sculpture.

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  The final sculpture

Audio of the Sound Sculpture

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Reflection

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For me, this project was very difficult for me to start. A few days consisted to playing around and finding materials to mimic the sound I wanted. The rest of the week was figuring out how I wanted to sculpture to look like and being assembled. I thought this was a hard sound to recreate without straight up using the actual object creating the sound. It provided a lot of trial and error, and it was very frustrating.