Sound Memoir - Church

One thing that always hinders my ability to make plans with others is that most of my nights are already reserved for church and worship. Tuesday is bible study for my church, Wednesday is bible study for school, Thursday is christian club day, Friday is college fellowship, and all of Sunday is reserved for church activities. It’s a wonder at all how I can even get my homework done throughout the week.

This was the main reason that I decided to focus on this for my sound memoir project. It’s a bit disjointed because I go to several events throughout the week. I took all the events that I go to and created an amalgam of a night so that I could convey the most important aspects of my college life. Ensuring that no part was more important than the other and conveying the theme of “an average day of church” according to my life.

I ensured that my project would be different by displaying what my thought process is when I go through these activities. I did not just want to focus on the different aspects of the church experience, but I wanted to focus on my own unique experiences. The only way that I thought I could demonstrate this was if I had tried to do an inner monologue of what exactly I was thinking. If I were to display what I was thinking, it would make for a more compelling experience. It gives a forward of what to expect through each section of the piece. Each section would be a different aspect of the life that I lead in church and hearing my thoughts will allow listeners to “see” through my eyes.

I thought to make listeners know this through the introduction and conclusion sections of the sound memoir. By giving listeners this forward, it allowed for clarity before the the four sections were presented before I introduced my thoughts on the various church activities. At first, I was not sure if I was going to talk about it and let listeners just infer from what was going on throughout the project, but I determined that this was the proper way to go as there can be a lot of confusion that can derive from depriving the listeners of such information. I was thinking that it would create a dialogue between myself and the reader.

One aspect of this project that can seem deceiving is that it is a project about church that excludes a sermon. Having a sermon in the project made the project seem more preach-like then I had imagined it to be. I wanted my experience to be something that someone who would not normally go to church to relate to. It is why I decided to focus more on the social aspects of church: driving people, praise, fellowship are all actions that require interactions between other people. Getting to know them on a higher level and just talking with people. If it were anything like a sermon or a lesson it would make the experience just mundane and perturb the average listener from continuing.

I organized the experience linearly. Making it in this fashion conforms it to the theme that I had originally set out to maintain. If I were to just randomly jump between different scenes it would be akin to watching a movie out of order. It would not make any sense in the context that I set out in the introduction and would confuse listeners in the end. The contingency of the story depends on how it is presented and if I chose to have it as an episodic display, I doubt that it would have the same impact as it does now. In order for everything to make sense, it needed to be linear.

After I compiled all the sounds together with the audio recording of myself and the environments, I decided that in order to make it the best listening experience I could, I would decrease the volume of the environment while I was talking. This would make my voice pop out more than the background. When it was played normally, it was hard to hear what was what and it would just end up being more confusing.

One thing that I was playing with the idea of was having some songs of praise in the introduction and conclusion of the listening segment, however, I decided against that due to the fact that it seemed a little preemptive with what I was attempting. If I were to introduce any of that segment earlier, it would seem like I was trying to introduce a topic that I had not tried to talk about beforehand. It would go against the linearity that I was attempting to develop and would have destroyed the sequence of the story.

The songs of praise segment was actually recorded during a special praise night that was associated with a different church. I thought it sounded so nice that I wanted to put it into project instead of a different recording that I had on my phone. The downside of having a different praise team than I was accustomed to was the difference in time that it took for them to finish. This recording was a tad bit longer than I had wanted, so I decided to shorten the performance and have it fade into the background in order to achieve the effect I wanted it to have on the audience.

I wish that I could have changed the recording for the last portion of the project. I realized after the fact that the cafeteria setting was strikingly similar to the fellowship setting. Both setting serve a similar function, but the cafeteria setting was more of a public disturbance than the fellowship setting. Unfortunately, because I could not participate in fellowship nights since we started the project, I was unable to record a better sound that would be more unique in this project. I dealt with the cards I was given and attempted to make it clear that despite the similarities with the two settings, they invoked very different emotions and were handled in very different ways.

In the end, I was not as efficient as I wanted to be in doing this project. I made sure that the environment sounds were the main focus of the project and included an introduction and conclusion in order to give clarity to the project as a whole.