honestly don't know (soundscape)

honestly don't know from Bonnie Veblen on Vimeo.

what did I do? what was I trying to do?

I listened to sounds. I noticed how I listen to sound, what I choose to listen to, when I want music, when I don't. I listened to songs on once repeat, which is normal. I listened to my breath, which is normal. I listened to cars from my studio, and cringed as they passed, which is normal.

I looked up roots of words, thought about The Spell of the Sensuous, thought about Leap, translated between french and english, found roots in both. I breathed, I listened. I took pictures of my lung x-ray. I looked at the sumac outside my window.

I cut up the words of Terry Tempest Williams, Nervous but Excited, T.S. Eliot, Patty Larkin, Allen Ginsberg and Mary Oliver into perhaps a thousand pieces, and pulled them one at a time out of a pile, stringing them back together. I saw what was there, and started to play with it. I moved things, cut it down, recorded myself speaking it.

I played on a guitar. I experienced making harmonics with strings for the first time. I listened to right after, my song I play on clarinet, on once repeat. I recorded some basic guitar.

I recorded my voice, my breath. I recorded my voice, my breath. I recorded my voice, my breath. I recorded Latin, French, English. I recorded my voice, my breath. I recorded my voice my breath. Irecordedmyvoicemybreath. I honestly don't know.

I came back to the cut up. I chose. I recorded my voice, my breath.

I put together a video of photographs of a sumac tree and an x-ray of my lungs, my window at home.

What did I want to do? I’m honestly not really sure. I suppose this is a meditation on death and life, and the ambiguity between those. Can we experience death in life? Can we experience life in death? Do we ever really know where we are? Do we ever really know whether we’re alive or dead?

I had to find the sound that was right for the video, to set the tone, guide the viewer's thoughts towards our bodies, impermanence, quietness, death//life, fractures, joy, shyness, hesitancy, being on a border, being the same as another and different from another, being in multiple places at once, and I'm not really sure what else. A huge long cut up was too much, instrumental music was too abstract, and going between breath to Latin to English to Latin to breath was too literal a progression and too abstract//conceptual. I wanted to push the viewer in some kind of direction with the words and my breath, and the quietness, but also leave room for openness.

Perhaps I’m not all that interested in making a piece about sound, but using it in tandem with my images. It's not about one or the other, both support each other. And now I just want to make more.

cut up

I did a cut-up of a lot of different writings//lyrics I was reading and listening to this summer--all of them were incredibly resonant at the time, and still are. I then edited it down and recorded myself reading it. I'm not sure that I like it as a sound piece, perhaps because it's strange for me to listen to my own voice. So while there are some interesting themes running through it, and I really like the repetative, obsessive quality of it, I'm not sure that this is the best form for it. I've thought about putting parts of this to images in a video, but it seems like it might take away from the video footage, or be too explicit. It's not like the hair piece where the words came along with the images. And it's really long, too, so I don't know that anyone would make it all the way through since it's so free-flowing and there's hardly a place to grab on. I need to keep trying some other things with it, I guess.

I also did this recording of me fooling around on guitar, sort of similar to the song I wrote//have been continually improvising with on clarinet, but I don't actually know guitar, so this is a lot harder//more elementary and thus even more repetative. Again, it is obsessive.

One major thing is, I need to figure out what sound goes with my videos, if any. I feel like something should, but I don't know what. This is why I did these two experiments, but they're not right for the video, nor are they completed sound pieces in themselves.

I guess I have a lot of different ways that I appreciate sound, so this is a hard project for me to approach. I have played clarinet for 12 years, so have quite a bit of a formal//classical background in music. I love French music especially--Debussy, Saint-Saens, Poulenc, Jeanjean--pretty much anything rhapsodic, with a tendency towards slower and darker pieces.

In terms of listening to music, I tend to listen to songs obsessively, often preferring hearing a single song to hearing anything else for days, sometimes weeks. I don't know why this is, other than that I simply crave those sounds. And far more often than not, it is the sounds I crave--the harmony and the rhythm--rather than the lyrics. In the last year I have finally started to barely catch and sometimes listen to lyrics, but it is not what I hear first by any means.

In terms of sounds I make with my body, I like listening//feeling the sound of my heart and my breath. I like the rhythm of walking, and the feel, but sometimes don't notice the sound. I like humming and absolutely love reading aloud for the vibrations. I often read aloud to Emma and Jacob, the kids that I have babysat for about 8 years, for an hour or so at a time. I love being with them, and I love reading, and sharing an enjoyment of books with them, but there is also just something very calming and comforting to feel my own (or someone else's) voice run through my body, and to be sharing that with others. My mom read to us as kids, and I think my own satisfaction in this sense of vibration probably comes from that. In this way, recorded sound almost seems like a cop-out because your body isn't actually penetrated by the sound, so it is a strange experience. And yet recordings are the only thing that allow me to listen to the same song//sounds for literally days on end.

I also have an interest in harmonics (and dissonance) as related to quantum physics, schumann resonance, biological receptor molecules, and the fifth chakra//meditation, which all meet up in the back somewhere. I don't really want to make artwork about that. But let's just say, anything that deals with sound deals with all of them in some form or another.

If I were to share anything about sound, it would be the satisfaction of vibration. What about asking everyone to stand in a circle and hum with everyone's hand on the other's back? What about having the group read something? What about engaging a group with live ambient sounds rather than recorded sound? (Recorded sound is technically live, but resonates differently). If I were to use sound convey something, it would be to put to my videos that I'm working on, but I don't know what I want to do with that right now. I don't know what I need to say. I don't know if what I need to say is in words or in sounds or in music I play. I do know that I miss my clarinet, and that I need to go to bed.