Review on The Isle is Full of noises

On November 29th, instead of having class, we went to see a special event that held at Empac. It was a unique sound installation that based on Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. The name of this thing is called The Isle is Full of Noises. So I think it meant to let us escape the familiar society and get into this amazing island. It included the piece from William Shakespeare's play , pieces of human voices, noises and other animal sounds. I was told that this was made by eight channel sound composition using wave field synthesis speaker arrays.

When we first entered this dark room, I immediately saw many spotlights pointed down to some areas. They were all on the right side and were equally separated. And on the right of that are those wave field synthesis speakers. The sound came from those things. Michael then played a 15 minute piece and asked us to stand or sit wherever we want to feel it. He encouraged us to sit under the spotlight because he told us that these spots were supposed to be where all sound meet together and was the “best” spot to hear them.  To me, at first I feel lost and had no idea what this was. I sat in a corner and started to hear those sounds. They seemed to be unorganized and definitely won’t form a beautiful music piece. But as time goes, as you hear them long enough, you could start to find a unique feeling about it. I couldn’t tell what was it but those noises were not as bad as the beginning. The room and the amazing speakers just brought me to another world. When I close my eyes, I feel I was not stand in a room in empac, but instead I was on an isle with all those noises around me. I think I would definitely not have the same experience if I were in an open area to hear this.

Then he sat down in front of a computer and there was a screen at right of it to let us see what he was doing. He showed us what he did with those sounds. He demonstrated the removal of different sound in different sound tracks and we can clearly hear the difference. I am a video editor so I know how different tracks works but I am not very familiar with sound. Michael just showed us even with one sound, when you change the frequency or speed, it makes a great difference. And I can’t imagine what it took for those musician to make a legendary piece.

And another group of students came in, they were from another class. Then Michael played another long piece where we could hear human chatting. It was not very clear, I couldn’t follow what they were saying. So it was the words of Caliban and Miranda, and I think he twisted them a little bit so we were hard to tell what they were saying.

It was a very unique experience to me and I enjoyed it. Although I still don’t know what this art piece trying to achieve but it clearly freshes my mind on sound mixing. It reminds me of the music piece 4’33’’. They both used the noises to create the art piece and it got me thinking that nowadays we always put on our earphones to listen to music. But when did we started to not hear what’s around us. What could be more beautiful than those nature sound?Am I stuck into this society and can’t get way with it? I don’t know.