Karen Nicholson

stereo sound composition, 3:13 minutes

 

My sound piece was inspired by Professor Sholeh Asgary’s artist lecture. For some reason, I had never considered that sound alone can act as an artistic medium, beyond music. Your art and what you had to say about it profoundly impacted me, especially when you remarked on how sound allows for a way to convey and evoke emotion oftentimes more accurately than other mediums. I wholeheartedly agree, sound can elicit a wide range of emotions, which I was able to feel while listening to your works. My piece also connects to Sarah Sharma’s “In the Meantime” through the idea of the temporal perspective. The temporal is concerned with the “order of life” or the every day, something I wanted my piece to be grounded in. The temporal also deals with the passage of time, which I tracked through sound. Sharma remarks, “time is lived at the intersection of a range of social differences that include class, gender, race, immigrant status, and labor;” even though my piece is not at face-value a commentary on this, I recognize that all art is political. I made a conscious choice to include all aspects of Berkeley life, especially areas like People’s Park that show the wide range of people that inhabit this city, and attend university. The intersectionality of identities in the student body is boundless, and therefore I did not want my piece to be solely limited to sounds from classrooms and games. I wanted it to reflect the life of Berkeley, and cause the listener to reminisce on the emotions and experience of college years.