Tinker Twain

My purpose for revising this blog from the 2/26/09 blog is two-fold. The first being that last week I was barely among the living with illness and second, the way our (Leta and I) sound project turned out is different enough from our original thoughts that I thought it best to explain it more accurately.

Us

To understand where how we ended up where we did, one must understand that Leta is a laywer and I am writer (she is also a drummer).

Our Process

The Texts

Our interest in creating a text driven sound piece still remains (as I mentioned in my previous and now deleted blog) in some kind of destruction and creation of text, physically, legally and figuratively. We first recorded ourselves reading The Tinker Law, a previously banned passage of James Joyce’s Ulysess, a passage from Mark Twains Tom Sawyer, and the U.N. freedom of expression law. Leta then thought it might be interesting to whisper these passages, so we did. It was creepy.

The Twain passage:

“I love you so and you seem to try every way you can to break my old heart with your outrageousness By this time the dental instruments were ready The old lady made one end of the silk thread fast to Tom's tooth with a loop and tied the other to the bedpost Then she seized the c hunk of fire and suddenly thrust it almost into the boy's face The tooth hung dangling by thebedpost now But all trials bring their compensations” (Twain)

was found by searching for the word “love” in the public domain google books version of Tom Sawyer and chosen because of the strangeness of the dental instruments phrase. Mark Twain’s novel was chosen because the banning of Twain novels is so well known and wide spread. We chose Ulysses for the same reason. The Ulysses passage: “Touch me. Soft eyes. Soft, soft, soft hand. I am lonely here. Oh, touch me soon, now. What is that word known to all men? I am quiet here alone. Sad too. Touch, touch me (Joyce, 49) was chosen by me as it’s one of my favorite Ulysses passages but also because it was banned (most likely because it was seen as pornographic). The laws were chosen by Leta (she’s the lawyer) and both deal with freedom of expression and creativity.

The Sounds

Our first editing job was to infiltrate the whispered texts of the laws with the whispered texts from the banned books. We took the actual texts of the laws and the banned books and carefully pulled out words from the banned books then placed them carefully into the freedom of expression laws. Laws can aid in the creation (or more specifically the protection) of art and expression but laws like the Tinker law actually can destroy these freedoms. By inserting previously banned texts into these laws, I see this as a chance for art and expression to infiltrate law instead of law infiltrating and impacting expression.

Our goal then became that every sound in our sound piece would be made from our original recordings of sound. They still of course had to do with the destruction or creation of text. The sounds that made it into the final version are: a lighter, a typewriter, encyclopedias being dropped and the sound of Leta writing on a sketch pad with a pencil. We altered these sounds using Audacity, some even developed a kind of beat. These were layered over the whisper/text tracks to form the project.

The following are some sound pieces that are similar and/or influential to our piece:

Cornelius Toner

Text Sound Compositions on UBU