After the last tutorial I had an idea for my radio play differently, could this be turned into an audio game like presentation. I found a game called unheard.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/942970/Unheard__Voices_of_Crime/
It’s a detective game played through sound, and I’m very inspired by that, so maybe I can try to make a game like that to innovate. I may need to find some partners for this. I still need to keep a skeptical attitude towards this idea.
A radio play script follows a distinctive format that allows the playwright to convey how sound and music will be used in the performance. For instance:
I recently listened to a radio play called Three-Body problem, which is a novel in Chinese. There are many seasons of the radio drama and I listened to one of its episodes.
There was a trailer made at the beginning of the play and I could hear the ambient sounds in it, people walking, whispering and the sound of water, it felt like a conversation in an office. What I thought was good about the trailer was that it was mixed very harmoniously and led by the dialogue. The sound effects are very appropriate for the sci-fi theme of the show. But what I felt was lacking was that it was a trailer that cut the first two minutes of the episode. This made me feel like I was listening to a repeat of something that didn’t surprise me.
The vocals on this radio drama are very bright and clear, and I can clearly understand what is being said in the drama. In contrast to our radio drama, the vocals always had a different vibe as each character was not recorded at the same time, probably due to the environment in which they were recorded.
In this radio drama, I thought it was very well done in terms of articulation. In the trailer, I could hear the mood going from relaxed to tense, and the music in it was very nicely matched. I think this is something we should learn from.
In this radio project, the theme of our group is campus violence. We want to make a radio drama to reflect the harm of campus violence to the victims and distort the psychology of the perpetrators.
Campus violence still exists in today’s society, and many victims have been greatly hurt. Some perpetrators of campus violence don’t care who you are or what relationship you have with them. They will make campus violence against people who look introverted without reason.
There are many films that also shoot the theme of campus violence. My inspiration comes from the Chinese film “Better Days”, which tells the harm of campus violence. A campus accident on the eve of the college entrance exam changes the fate of two teenagers. Chen Nian is introverted and a top student in school. The accidental fall of a classmate leads to a series of untold stories, and Chen Nian is involved in them… At her loneliest moment, a teenager named Xiao Bei enters her world. The majority of people’s 18 years are bright and happy, but they have tasted the indifference of the adult world in advance in the summer of 18 years. A secret “battle” is being staged, and they will work together to protect the dignity of teenagers.
I want to express a better meaning with a limited number of people, so I intend to express it with a suspense method. Because I’ve seen some suspense movies recently, “Knives Out”， “Murder on the Orient Express”， “the invisible guest“. I found that these films have common characteristics. The first is that there are few places, and the second is that the number of actors is relatively fixed.
Autobiographical ethnography is a genre of autobiography that connects individuals to culture, society and politics. Autobiographical ethnographic works are usually written in the first person and appear in a variety of creative forms. Examples include short stories, musical compositions, poetry, photographic essays and reflective journals. Musical autoethnography explores the intersection of autoethnographic methods and music studies.
My work also falls under the Autoethnography concept, as I will be using my own field recordings to modify and mix. And these recordings will be of subjects that are more personal to me. The Autoethnography concept of working in the first person is also a new idea for me, as I may be able to do monologues or some first-person style for my audio.
I also examined this collection of articles, and in the first section, “Songwriting and Improvisation,” the authors explore how the process of songwriting and improvisation can be used as a powerful autoethnographic tool for storytelling and reflecting on significant life experiences. In the second section, “Interpretation and Performance”, the diversity of experiences that musicians face in singing and interpreting musical works is emphasized. The diversity of experiences faced by musicians in singing, interpreting musical works, acquiring musical skills, and losing the ability to play music due to injury. The third section, ‘Learning and Teaching’, provides autoethnographic descriptions of learning music in three different cultural and pedagogical contexts, including Bali, Southern China, and Western conservatory settings. In the fourth section, ‘Researching Identity and Transdifferentiated Contexts’, the authors use autoethnography as a means of describing and reflecting on their experiences of researching in a number of musical and cultural contexts.
The final presentation of my project is in the form of a combination of audio and visual and interactive forms.
My current reference for a visual motif is the clock, as I clock moves with the passage of time just like my sound memory. I might do an effect of a clock that keeps turning, here’s what I was inspired by.
Solstice is a Kinetic Timepiece, that does a lot more than just tell the time. Solstice turns time into a moving piece of art. It ‘breathes’ in and out over a 12 hour period, gradually opening and closing like a flower. At midday, when the sun is highest in the sky the clock-face is at its largest. At 6pm when the sun has dropped lower in the sky, the clock-face is at its smallest. Solstice has two modes: clock-mode and demo-mode. In clock-mode Solstice functions just like a clock, keeping time and completing one rotation every 12 hours. In demo-mode Solstice completes one rotation every minute, beautifully opening and closing in front of your eyes. Solstice continues to keep perfect time even if left in demo mode for days.
我会用touchdesigner设计出以时钟为原
In the past few days in China, I saw some older veteran actors and actresses perform two performances of Yueju Opera; the first one, and the other one was in Yueju Opera Town, which is located in Shi Jiaao Village, Ganlin Town, Shengzhou City, Zhejiang Province, the birthplace of Chinese women’s Yueju Opera, and occupies an area of 3.68 square kilometers, making it China’s first cultural tourism town named after a drama genre. It is the first cultural tourism town in China named after a theatre genre.
They all performed the same piece, “Dajinzhi – Challenging the Palace.” “Dajinzhi – Challenging the Palace” is a trendy Yue opera piece that tells a story rich in legend. The play is renowned for its vivid character portrayals, dramatic plotlines, and exquisite performances. The story revolves around a woman who intrudes into the palace, attempting to fight for her rights and justice. Her courage, resilience, and determination to confront authority make her a hero in the audience’s eyes. In this play, the performers’ singing is deeply emotive and compelling. Through melodious and engaging singing and vivid acting, they vividly present the passion, struggles, and emotional complexities within the story. Particularly, the portrayal of the main character is brave yet charismatic, leaving a strong impression on the audience.
In Yue opera, the main instruments include percussion: clappers, wooden clappers, large and small gongs, and cymbals. String instruments: erhu, zhonghu, sanxian, pipa, liuqin, and yangqin. Wind instruments: flute, xiao (vertical bamboo flute), and dizi (transverse bamboo flute). Brass instruments: suona (Chinese double-reed horn). With the innovative development of opera music, starting from the 1950s, many classical instruments were added to the commonly used instruments, such as sheng (Chinese mouth organ), zheng (zither), and various Western instruments, especially violin, cello, bass, suspended cymbals, flute, clarinet, etc. These additions greatly enriched the expressive capabilities of Yue opera music.
To better reflect the sound of my hometown, I also returned to the place where I was first born, Shengzhou, Shaoxing, a small city not far from Hangzhou, which I still feel is an important place even though I didn’t grow up here most of my life. Shengzhou is more famous for Yueju Opera, which is one of the significant Chinese opera genres. I will discuss this part in detail in another blog.
My recordings in the Gongchenqiao area of Hangzhou made me think that my Sound might not have been very distinctive, as a lot of the more grounded sounds had disappeared. So I returned to my grandmother’s house, which is in a small village surrounded by mountains and water. With young people preferring to work in the city, most of the village’s residents are now elderly. They generally lead a self-sufficient life, with their land to grow vegetables. Since there are few young people, the village is usually quiet. I recorded the cries of some poultry, the ambient sounds of the village, and the sounds of some elderly people beating drums and reciting Buddhist scriptures. When I listen back to these sounds, they are very special because we don’t have many chances to get in touch with such sounds after living in the city for a long time.
The location of my field recording was a natural bamboo forest near the entrance of my grandmother’s village. I used the Sennheiser 416 microphone, which has more penetrating power and can record more details, and connected it to the sound device’s mix pre for noise cancellation. This was also the first time I used the 416 to record outdoors, and I could hear the sound from several dozen metres away very clearly when I was wearing monitor headphones.
When I listen to my recordings, I can hear the apparent scraping of bamboo leaves in the bamboo forest and even the buzzing of insects vibrating their wings as they fly by the microphone. I could also hear cars traveling down the road in the distance and the sound of the family dog barking in the house next to me. The only downside is that I didn’t bring a stand with me to record with, which resulted in my recordings possibly producing some additional noise due to the shaking of my handheld.
The first point I chose for field recording was called Gongchen Bridge, a large historic bridge built in the fourth year of the Ming Dynasty and collapsed in the eighth year of the Shunzhi Dynasty of the Qing Dynasty. The bridge was rebuilt in the 53rd year of the Kangxi reign. On the east side of the bridge is the Canal Culture Square; the square has a shopping supermarket, and there is the antique architecture of the teahouse and singing theatre stage. I remember when I was a kid, I used to come to the square every weekend to hang out, and there were many events in the square during major traditional festivals, such as the lantern show at the Lantern Festival and the annual fireworks display. So when I did this project, the first place that came to my mind for recording was this side of the Gongchen Bridge, which I’m very familiar with. But, when I went there this time since I hadn’t been back in China for almost three years, it changed a lot, not to mention the memories I had of it as a child.
My SOUND WALK was conducted with this red line on the map, and I walked from the south end of the line to the north end, and the sounds along the way had different dynamics. At the south end, there were almost as many shops in the area, so there were relatively more people, and I could hear people discussing and some of the shops playing promotional loudspeakers. I also listened to the sound of a gyroscope, which was also recorded in the plaza, and when I heard it in the distance, I thought it was the sound of children playing with firecrackers (a kind of firecracker that explodes when thrown on the ground with force). At the north end of the road are some tree-lined paths for people to come and walk and exercise. So in this area, the sounds are all natural ambient sounds, and I could also hear the sound of a ship’s engine going by. The place where the amplitude of the sound was the greatest was at the centre of the route, that was also the head of the Gongchen Bridge. Crowds of people converged there, some taking photos, some buying things at roadside stalls, and there were also some older people discussing in dialect.
After I listened to all my field recordings in the Gongchen bridge area, I felt that the sound of this area is entirely different from what it was ten years ago; when I was a child, I remember that on the west side of the bridge, which is now a more commercialized neighborhood, there used to be a lot of vendors who would come on bicycles to sell food that they had made, and those sounds of shouting and selling were very nostalgic for me, and now all of that has disappeared because the government doesn’t allow these vendors to freely The government doesn’t allow these vendors to sell food freely. This may also be a negative emotional impact of the change for some of the more nostalgic people.
One of the most important goals of my recording trip back to China was to record one of China’s traditional operas, Yueju Opera. Yueju Opera was born in my hometown Shengzhou, flourished in Shanghai, and is now mainly popular in Suzhou, Zhejiang and Shanghai.
There is some controversy over the origin of the name of Yueju Opera, and the evolution of the name of Yueju Opera and its designation in different periods have not been accurately verified due to the different accounts of people in different parts of the country at that time. I visited the Yueju Opera Museum in Shengzhou. According to the introduction of the museum, in the middle of the 19th century, optimistic Shengzhou peasants used to entertain themselves by singing in the fields when they were working or resting. Some peasants would improvise their own songs, such as singing “The boss of southern goods is rich, gold and silver treasures roll in” in front of a shop; in villages, they would sing small stories of rural life; and in the early days, they sang the Sigonghuo (Four Workers’ Harmony) tune, which has a high and bright pastoral tone and a gentle and mellow rhythm. The “Four Workers’ Harmony” has a high and bright pastoral tone and a mellow melodious and undulating melody and is made up of two parts: the main singing and the receiving tune (the helping voice). The main part of the melodious phrases has three forms: “starting melodious phrases, up and down phrases, and guandao turning phrases”. The melodic expressions of the picking-up and singing parts are connected behind the starting melodic phrases as the transitional melodic phrases that carry on the previous and start the next; and behind the guandan melodic phrases as the intermission transition, which can be used as the melodic phrases of the falling melodic phrases.
In 1906, the early form of Yueju theatre also evolved into the rural cao tai (草台). I remember when I was very young, this form also existed; usually during some festivals and temple fairs, there would be a troupe of theatre vaudeville and other performances. Every time there was such a performance, my grandmother would take me to watch. They set up the stage shantily, and I vaguely remember that the radio equipment is not very good, but the audience is still delighted to see. Unfortunately, I didn’t record these performances with my video camera.