#it might resonate a lot more than the previous source or vice versa

[dreamyaqua]

I related a lot to that, thank you 🙏🏻 astrology explains so much, and I love seeing people’s interpretations.

I also have a Leo stellium in my personal planets, and a Virgo Venus, (forgot if I mentioned this but I also have a 8th H stellium, with my sun in moon being in it 😅)

Everything I’ve read about having a 8th H stellium and having a Scorpio Mars has been accurate so far - 🦁❤️

Ohh I'm glad to hear that🥺 And I can only agree with you, I've learned so much about myself and others through astrology and whenever I find out a super random fact, I'm surprised all over again by how much astrology can really tell.... but also, the deeper I dive into it, the more painfully obvious it also is how little I know in comparison to all the knowledge that there is...but alas, that only makes me excited to learn and understand more.🥺

Oh wow, that 8th house stellium gives you even more Scorpio energy, I could definitely imagine you to have a very intense/powerful energy and on top of that pairing it up with Leo, that's just - wow. I personally really like mixing Leo and Scorpio energy but maybe that's because I've got both signs in my personal placements as well.😂 I'm really glad to hear the things you've read about these placements so far have resonated with you!!

Although, I always feel like it's also important to put everything into perspective and only take what resonates because in the end, astrology isn't supposed to force something upon us that we are not and maybe one person's interpretation doesn't resonate with you as well as someone else's.🥺 On that note, I'm also super happy that you could relate to the things I wrote🥺✨

#i'm saying this bc sometimes i read something about a certain placement and when i read about the same placement from another source #it might resonate a lot more than the previous source or vice versa #i also feel like sometimes the things you can read about certain placements project a lot of negative energy #that can make some people feel like they're 'doomed' with these placements when in fact someone else might talk about them #in a much more positive light #i get that a lot with scorpio and 8th house themes especially #i feel like those people who don't have this intense scorpio energy in their own chart might view it as too much too dark #too intense too destructive etc. but imo those people who embody this energy like the passion the mystery the darkness #so depending on who you're talking to you might get a very different response on a certain placement #bc in the end astrology is also very intuitive and therefore some subjective energies go into it as well #i've talked to people who've told me that reading about some of their placements - when it was negative - made them feel down or scared #and that's not what astrology is about #there's positives and negatives to everything and depending on how developed and mature we are #we exude the more positive or the more negative traits of a placement #in the end astrology is simply meant as a tool for growth self-improvement and fostering understanding #i do have to tell that to myself here and there as well bc reading something negative or scary about your own placement can definitely be #a shock #sorry omg i rambled so much just now #ask #🦁❤ anon #astro asks

[yahxxyy]

Summary

Thesis concept & goal

Comprised of personal memorable sounds and high-pitched sounds, hEARing is an auditory spatial experience that reimagines an individual’s hearing experience in an abstract way to blur the edge of human auditory perceptions. The sound piece is looping almost like an ambient sound in the background, the participants enter the space with an anticipation of hearing this, but then a sudden intervention of high frequencies, vague sound elements and sonic dust leads to a unique experience for every participant in the sharing space. This intended disparate hearing experience is distinguished by different human auditory systems. Physically, human sensibilities differ from person to person. Psychologically, sound echoes differing memories, reflections and emotions. So now the privilege of perceiving the piece is transferred to the participants unconsciously. They cannot hear what you hear, they cannot sense what you sense and vice versa. The goal of hEARing is to create a sonic experience that addresses an intriguing inquiry towards human sensations to enforce the participants’ questioning the sound perception itself.

The audio of hEARing is made for looping in a quiet enclosed space to create spatial acoustic environment leading to some interesting effects. It is an experience that the audience can leave anytime they want. When they first enter the space and are given a variety of sounds to hear and feel, and they will be disturbed by sound interventions, like high frequencies, vague sound elements and sonic dust, which appear at half to one minute intervals.

I am super sensitive to the high frequencies,  I have been aware of this because my body reacts to these sounds strongly. I felt the blood vessels in the back of my brain and temples pumping really hard, and I got headache and dizzy immediately, while I was approaching these art pieces consisting of a bunch of old televisions or radios (around 16khz). The common hearing of range can be heard by humans is 20 hz to 20,000 hz, but a gradual loss of sensibility to hearing, especially higher frequencies, is normally relative to age. I know that a lot of people can hear the sound but this special “gift” of physical unpleasantness bugs me so much. I can hear the buzzes of router, outlet, old telephones, etc. The place where I am currently working as an intern is full of electrical equipments, I feel very uncomfortable being surrounded by these little pure high pitch sound. Sometimes my body reacts. For example, the decreasing interest of diet, loss of concentration, and dizziness. Is it quite unfair? Why do I need to hear this “noise” and realize that to hear this is an excess of hearing? But when there is no sound around, like Anechoic Chamber in BYU. Without the reverberation, people might feel they are  in a small room and cause claustrophobia. People might get panic because they used to have these sounds around them. And they will try to make up the sounds so that will probably cause hallucination. Most hear the sounds of their bodies, like blood vessels, fluids, heart beat. “When there is nothing to hear, so much starts to sound. Silence is not the absence of sound but the beginning of listening.” (Salome Voegelin, Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound) When you get out of the space, you might be aware of that you are become more sensitive to the world. In Perfect Hearing, Nubar Alexanian actually considers his tinnitus, somehow, as a grateful thing. The documentary recreates what Nubar is hearing daily. A loud and steady pure tone like La Monte Young’s piece, The Second Dream of the High Tension Wire. “You just have to gonna live with it.” The first doctor he met told him to get used to his tinnitus, because there is no cure for this. Abby, Nubar’s daughter whose hearing loss affected her pronunciation of certain words, said she could not imagine having this tone in her hearing, but then thought it was quite interesting. “It’s not that bad……I haven’t really lived with perfect hearing ever, so I can’t compare……you couldn’t imagine this in your hearing, and I can’t image tinnitus.” Sometimes, she wonders what is like to hear everything perfectly, to “have that entire sound of every, like, aspect of someone’s voice, or music, every note…... would be incredible to me.” An extra, a loss. What is a moderate hearing, or often regarded as perfect hearing? Even though we know that everyone’s perception is different, we still trapped in the body and view the world within our own limits. We will never understand what others feel, we are just what we are sensing. Our experience of sensing, a primary research of the world, is the scope of our understanding.

I was influenced by artworks such as Synesthetic Calculus by David Genco which is a piece that visualizes what he has perceived into a video piece (synesthesia is a  perceptual phenomenon of stimulating one sense which leads to a secondary different sense or cognition) and anosmia smell wheels by Christine Kelly. We can see from the wheels how her olfaction become worse in a couple weeks. Theses are such personal projects but so powerful to give people a sense of what are their perceptions of smell and vision. Since I don’t have any previous experience on making a spatial sound art, in order to figure out what other artists have done in music and sound experiments. I attended a performance of Mark Cetilia, a sound/media artist, who is usually working at electronic music and the nexus of analog and digital technology. The piece he presented was Dissolution, 2013. It was an amazing performance and the long high-pitched pure tone in the last part increased tension and generated auditory hallucination (maybe it was just me). And another piece caught my attention while I was browsing his portfolio is Precipice, 2013 - “Precipice is a generative composition existing at the the edge of perception.” It works almost like ambient sound but more than that. The “weightless tones” and “bits of sonic dust” together blur the line of white noise that can be ignored and noise that be noticed by people.

What if there was a lack of consistency of sound and vision in real life? Does the inability to “turn off” equate to importance? How do these impaired hearing affect people’s sensory perception? Inspired by Perfect hearing, I wanted to create an experience that immerses my testers under different situations of “abnormal” hearing for the previous prototypes. In the first prototype, I am always in your head, my testers were asked to put on headphones with tinnitus sound during the whole conversation. I would ask them questions about their sound memory and experience. Some of them felt uncomfortable, agitated, hard to concentrate, or even good with it. The second prototype, Can you hear me?, was an attempt to deprive the common sounds and add on faint sounds to my testers. They were asked to put on headphones and wander around D12. I field-recorded the sound of D12, and removed the human voice from the recording. It was not a successful attempt, unlike the vocals, the human voice in this recording was being unclear and mixed with the environmental sounds. So I went back to see what sound is actually. In terms of the physics, sound is vibrations travelling through medium, reaching to animals’ ears and being processed by brains. My question here is how can I manipulate sound source to give my audience a different auditory perception which will cause them question the perception itself rather than the sound or sound source? Then I made the third prototype called What am I hearing?. I was creating a spatial sonic experience using a device to pick up and amplify faint noise and reduce the sound we are usually able to hear. I meant to use contact microphone which can pick up audio vibrations through contact, and transduce structure-borne sounds.

The above prototypes are purely experimental to help me test with people’s different sensory perceptions. In the current concept, I am more focused on utilizing these experiments and research to make a sound installation. The guiding working questions are: how can I produce them to a sound piece that create resonance among people? How can I make the piece of and out of ambient sounds? What sound components can I use to create the piece? The audio sample that I played in the pop-up show is: hEARing, it is about 5:30 minutes long. I used my own field recordings and picked high quality recordings from (https://freetousesounds.com/) as background sound, and did a few editings and added effects, in order to create an acoustic environment like soundscape. Then, I designed my own high-pitched tones and found some electronic sound recordings like electromagnetic fields. I considered the piece from two aspects, as an composition and as ambient sound. Because it is not a performance or a concert that audience will listen from the beginning to the end. To ensure that I can catch the audience’ attention when they first enter the space and give them a variety of sounds to hear and feel, I placed the sound interventions, like high frequencies, vague sound elements and sonic dust, at half to one minute intervals. I kept testing with sound in different equipments, especially headphones and speakers, and figured out that speaker is a better way to create spatial acoustic environment and lead to some interesting effects. During the time I was producing my sound, I felt extremely uncomfortable and easily being irritated. I thought that was mostly because I had been continuously exposed under high frequency sounds. I was showing my work in the Thesis Pop up show and received amazing feedbacks. The reactions of most audience have reached my expectation. Document here. During the show, there were basically three types of people experiencing my work. The first type of audience felt fear in the thunder-like ambient sound, the second type felt meditation from the ambient sounds, the third type felt nothing. Some people did not even wanted to enter the space, because it made them feel stressful and the space created by sound was like a barrier/enchantment (结界) that will trap them inside. The high frequencies were like hovering on the top and lasting in the back of head. Some people heard these, some didn’t. Some reacted strongly, some didn’t.

I have been interning in harvestworks this fall and recently I have talked with Carol Parkinson, the executive director, about my thesis, she offered me quite a lot references, such as TELLUS magazine on ubuweb, Pauline Oliveros, and Seth Cluett. I would also like to push forward my piece to spatial audio. I consulted Bernardo Herdy who is a sound designer from Brazil and now studying in harvestworks about the spatial sound effect. And there are two ways he suggested to do, one is using spatial sounds by placing four speakers around the space, another one is to have ambient sonic headphones. Here are two articles that I am going to read: Spatial audio: how to record for VR and The main lesson we learned about recording spatial audio is probably old — but still valuable. And he suggested me to work with REAPER which is a cheaper and lighter software than Pro Tools for multi-channels sound production.

December: Study the artists, research on perception, sound and recordings, equipments, learn REAPER

January: Recordings, hearing test, test with the technology and equipment, try to play with spatial VR sound.

February: Recordings, hearing test, test with the technology and equipment, decide on the experience (headphones or speakers), sound editing, experiment with different spatialized environments (test with different room sizes, height, materials).

March: Sound editing, testing with different people and spaces to find out the best setting.