Kathleen's Machine, Take 1
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This soundtrack is one of those crazy mixes of interview and "memoryscape." The primary speaker is my mom, Kathleen Barrett Price, talking to us kids around the dining room table in 2003. She'd been listening to digital restorations of old 78-rpm recordings that she'd made with her family in the 1940s. World War II was raging; her brother had been killed. But the family found solace in song and laughter. My mother and her sister captured some of the warmth and some of the silliness on shellac platters with a recording turntable, the results now digitally preserved -- the "memoryscape."
My intention was to create a piece that expressed the mood of a time and place -- a feeling, not so much a documentary. So it's experimental -- pushing the limits of my auditory aptitude.
It is 6 minutes long.
My thought is to embed this audio mix into a simple movie. There are more places to upload videos than pure "sound art." But it's a dilemma: I want the listener to just listen, to be drawn into the voices and not get distracted by exposition on a screen. The visuals need to enhance the experience, not break it down. Maybe just soundwaves? Onward...
4.8.2009 (rev. 4.9.09)
