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Students hand-make sound collectors to record sounds in daily life

(Report by student journalist) Deputy Executive Director of the MOST Humanity Innovation and Social Practice project team at NSYSU, Assistant Professor Shih-Hsiang Sung of the Program in Interdisciplinary Studies invited Kuen-Lin Tsai, a resident artist of Pier-2 Art Center, to lead the students to use materials around them to hand-make sound collectors and share the recordings. The students created sound collectors much different from professional sound equipment, using such materials as disposable bowls and corrugated paper, and recorded the soundscape around the campus, such as the sound of the waves and the light rail.

 

Kuen-Lin Tsai explained how to make a sound collector and the differences between various materials; wood, with its cracks and holes, can absorb more sounds and thus makes a good material for a sound collector, while plastic and other materials with less porous surface make the sound rebound and dissipate. A third-year student of the Department of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Chi Chang, used a different material than the corrugated paper used by the rest of the students - an oil paint plastic bucket and recorded the nearby daily life, such as the light rail in Pier-2 and breaking waves by the shore on the campus. Analyzing the audio recordings, Kuen-Lin Tsai estimated the distance between the sound collector and the ocean waves, and the position of the sound collector by the train arriving at the station. Concentrating on one single sound can make us more sensitive to the soundscape around us. Kuen-Lin Tsai said that instead of just receiving sounds inattentively, the gist for collecting sounds is to listen earnestly and carefully - only then can one grasp the close connection between these sounds to the daily life.

 

Kuen-Lin Tsai said that comparing different materials for sound collection, one can discover the existence of details often missed. Four-year student of the Department of Information Management Hao Yuan put in play his creativity and made his sound collector using a double-layer of corrugated paper, and placed in the refrigerator together with his smartphone to record sounds of the fridge and discovered that the sound moves slower in cold air than in hot air. One of the students, who lives in the Yancheng district, used the lid of the electric boiler to make a sound collector and experience different results of sound collection. Kuen-Lin Tsai played a recording of noises and explained that it was the sound of the ship berthing. The students were perplexed: they were astonished by rich soundscape of the ocean and the differences between the sound they heard from the land and under the water. Tsai said that the material of the collector is not the only thing that can influence the collected sounds; he advised the students to record the time of the recordings and take pictures so as to compare each other’s recordings taken in the same place.

 

In this workshop, Tsai let the students listen to various sounds and try to describe what produces them. Interestingly, sounds can be regarded as a tool - a common symbol or language to draw listeners’ attention to those sounds that we treat as an obvious part of everyday life and thus ignore, and discover the pleasure of listening to them.

 

(Edited by Public Affairs Division)

 

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