It is often easy to detach oneself from the creation of art and sound, especially once a skill or formula has been mastered by the artist. It is also easy to lose meaning and personal touch within the art when participating in this detachment. And once personal meaning is lost, it becomes hard to maintain that skill used- at least that’s what happened in my own experience. After reading about the “sonic meditations” of Pauline Oliveros, I was heavily inspired by her use of “self care” in all realms of life in order to become more intune with herself. Intrigued by what this did for Oliveros’ use of particularly her voice, I decided to use my own voice as a medium for the piece which I created, which can later be used as a measurement tool to conclude how effective Oliveros’ practice can be.

Using a heavily time stretched excerpt of a field recording taken of a park fencing (recorded with a contact microphone), I emulated my favourite Logic preset, ‘backwards metal’. This set an ominous tone for the piece, creating the perfect bed for my poem:

Cycles

Cycles

Looping up and down, cycles

No learning I keep repeating

Acts I’m self defeating

My skin, with fingernails I’m eating

Out my pores blood is seeping

I’m weeping.

I keep cycling ang cycling and cycling

And cycling until my bike breaks, mid break, spinning breaks, I need a break.

It’s all fake.

The faces, the light, everything in sight.

A made vision constructed of God’s mind-

I’m searching for answers I’ll never find,

Until we die we stay blind.

We’re binded

To non existent beauty we make up of

From man’s crumbs, we don’t clean after ourselves;

We’re too absent minded-

Mistaking self conceit for love

Putting false definitions in the meaning of wealth.

It’s all the loss of the sense of self.

Delicate in its modernity, the incorporation of a rap-like vocal allows for the piece to be accessible to a mainstream audience. I believe this is important, as the themes discovered within the words of the piece will convey feelings and messages that resonate not just with the typical consumer of abstract sound, like of which I have created. The incorporation of the vocal also allows me to express myself authentically, allowing my differing sonic practices to coexist.

Although I thought It’d be a harder challenge to use my voice as the main medium, I actually found it highly enjoyable; it becomes easier to convey ideas within the composition as I understand my own voice more than I do any technology. I would apply this same notion to my use of alto saxophone- I would (controversially) consider it a vocal instrument, as it is controlled with the mouth and breath in the same likeness as the voice. 
This piece was created after many attempts of using a graphic score as stimuli- however, that is still a concept I am yet to grasp. Creating this piece has taught me that I am comfortable working and creating acoustically, thus, in future I would like to incorporate more digitally created sounds- using digital and analogue synthesisers, and mastering the use of plugins to create a much more polished piece. Whilst I received feedback on the timing of the piece feeling “insecure”, this was an intentional addition, reflecting my current “sense of self”, as the title would suggest. As this is a piece created as a measurement marker, it needs to feel unsteady. If that makes it hard to listen to, then I’ll have to hope that retreating and working on my inner self will remedy that for the future.