Who Says You Can't

This workshop submission is a combination of sound and pictures.

To resize the images, adjust the width of your browser window. Scroll down at your own pace to look at everything.



























They say you can never cross the same river twice. Can you hear the same song in the same canteen twice?







The first time I returned to the house where I slept on a futon one studious summer, I encountered a bird with a broken wing.






If the future is predefined, and the past is mutable, I'm never going to live my unpleasant memories.



I'm never going to live my unpleasant memories.



I already lived them.




I never lived them.


Thank you for experiencing this. I have a few sources of inspiration.

On the audio front, I was interested in experimenting with the idea of retrocausality by recording a piece that contained a loop centered around a piece of music that I played backwards. That way, I could record layers upon layers, reverse the whole thing, and effectively have a loop that unravelled itself as it played backwards. This is a neat idea.

I tried to create synthesizer sounds that would sound roughly the same forwards and backwards.



At the same time, I was struck by the oddness of hearing "Who Says You Can't Go Home?" by Bon Jovi in my work cafeteria, I felt like it would be a rather fun/cruel joke to begin with an original composition that segued into retrocausal chaos that resolved itself into half-hearted Bon Jovi cover. Turns out my Bon Jovi cover was so half-hearted that it has been excised entirely, cauterized if you will, but the rest of it mostly remains.



It is really hard to listen to a riff, reverse it, and then try to replicate that. Rhythm is hard. I am lazy.


It also turns out that if I tried to make things sound similar forwards and backwards, well, the retrocausal stuff wasn't that sonically impressive -- so it's in there, but there isn't much of it.


I found myself more interested in what happened when I tried shortening things, and fading different parts of the improvisations on top of one another.



Ultimately, I decided to chop it up into pieces, such that the piece itself loops indefinitely, randomly picking one of a few predefined starting points, and randomly fading ontop of itself. Every time this page is loaded, the outcome is a little different.



The photographs are a mixtures of things, but many of them are intended specifically for this project. I wanted to really experiment more with longer exposures, but kinda failed to get a lot of the ideas I had done in time for this workshop. The very short exposure pictures of the fountain are ones that I find really interesting.


All of the pictures involve time in some way, all of them are from Seattle, from February, and many of them are from Cal Anderson Park -- the place with the fountain. I'd like to do more work there.

I would describe the pictures succinctly as "just what I do."


The words are what came to mind when I put the pictures in sequence, knowing the music was with them.


Thank you again for taking the time (har har har) to look at this! :)