Sound and Fury

I enjoyed Monday afternoon's Practitioner Study. Tom Espiner has come in to work with us on sound and we started to play with some objects to make sound. Some of these objects were instruments, and some of them were regular household objects. He asked us to then sit and play with the objects and our three instructions were to either play for yourself, listen and respond to another sound in the room, or choose to be silent. We sat in the relative dark and started to play. There seemed to be an inclination to compete to have the loudest sound in the room. There was also a tendency to pick up on any sort of percussive rhythm. He would occasionally ask us to get quieter, and then eventually divided the room in half, so that one half could just sit and listen to what the other half was doing. I found myself listening to some sounds that had previously been lost due to louder objects, like the flapping of an umbrella and the sound of running the moist tip of a finger around the rim of a glass of water. He then gave us an idea of an environment of sound to create. The environments were forest, desert, and mine. I then realized how our stereotypes feed into the sounds we identify with and create. I also realized, with a little frustration, that people were becoming a little ridiculous with the sounds being created. I think Rob mentioned this already, but both the desert and the forest sounded like there was a hurricane or tornado blowing through. Oh well, people must play.
I enjoyed the session and look forward to working with Tom over the next week.