Jules John

For this assignment I chose to create an experimental sound work.

For my experimental sounds, I focused on the simple household luxuries of tea and coffee. 

I wanted to somehow highlight the sonic differences between the two beverages, starting out initially with how the respective liquids boiled. 

I found that the sound of coffee percolating was more aggressive in nature contrasted against the water boiling for tea which is much more subdued.

Recording the two sounds in isolation was a simple task, but what I found more challenging was creating accompanying sounds that would accentuate the ideas I wanted to portray. Ultimately, my task here is to create the sounds of tea and coffee, somewhat of an abstraction and something alternate sounds will be of aid in.

After experimenting with various rhythmic sounds for the coffee track, I wound up using an almost tribal sounding loop of myself banging a stick on a fence in the park. I took the liberty of personally recording every aspect of my musical meanderings. I felt that recording the sound bytes myself allowed my work to be of a more personal nature. I didn’t want to rely on easy online resources. 

Furthermore, I added some background guitar and tried to couple the different musical textures with that of the boiling tea and coffee. That is, I tried to enhance my desired emotions with more traditional musical ideas. This came about as the solution to my original outset of using no traditional instruments. I feel that the addition of a guitar only adds to the experience, the distant nature of the instrument contributing to the eerie feel of the tracks.

Ultimately, I like the quiet, somber nature of what I have created. Although I am a fan of harsher experimental music, I wanted to create something more ambient in nature; more introspective. All in all, what I have created is what I truly expect coffee and tea to sound like!

You can listen to the two tracks below: