Our fourth project builds upon its predecessor and will work a little different than our usual prompts, but more on that in a moment . . .
Repetition is a technique at the very heart of poetic practice: from the strict patterns of rhythm and rhyme found in traditional verse to devices like litany and alliteration. For this mini-prompt, we'll be taking repetition to absurd lengths via technological means.
I'd like you to construct a 30 second audiotext that involves looping as its constitutional technique. While the length is absolute, all other details are open: you can use found sound or record your own audio, and you can select a loop of any length — it might be a five second sample that loops six times, half a second that loops sixty times, etc. and your loop need not begin and end cleanly, either.
"You know what's an excellent word to say out loud repeatedly?" Nicole Bonner chewed her hair. " 'Rinse.' Think about it, Mr. Kerchek. Rinse. Rinse."
— David Schickler, "The Smoker"
The point here, perhaps, is to find a new sort of beauty in language when we divorce ourselves from our usual relationship with it, achieving something not unlike a reduced reaction to semantic information (as in the example above). Or maybe what you'll find will be more semantic à la the potential for truths being revealed through the cut-up process (as Burroughs suggests). Also, while you'll be working in audio, there are textual precedents for this sort of experiment: cf. Ron Padgett's "Nothing in That Drawer," "Sonnet for Andy Warhol" and Two Stories for Andy Warhol (n.b. the detail shown on the linked page is one of ten identical pages from Padgett's book), or Aram Saroyan's minimalist work: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
You can set up loops pretty easily in both Audacity (highlight a portion of the waveform and hold down shift as you hit the space bar to start loop play mode) and Garageband (use the loop button in the toolbar with play, stop, etc. and set your loop area by dragging the edges of the yellow bar above the waveform) and you'll likely want to fine-tune your loops points before cutting and pasting your final product together. Likewise you'll probably want to make a number of these constructs — which can be pretty quickly thrown together — before deciding on the one that you want to present in workshop.
Your responses to this prompt should be in MP3 format — either as a SoundCloud link or an e-mail attachment — and should be exactly 30 seconds long. Please send your pieces to me (and me alone) by our class time on Friday, October 2nd. We'll go over these pieces in class on the 5th and 7th of October in a randomized order and you'll be encountering them for the first time in class, so you won't be writing comments ahead of time. You should, however, come prepared to discuss your peers' work on the fly.
You can set up loops pretty easily in both Audacity (highlight a portion of the waveform and hold down shift as you hit the space bar to start loop play mode) and Garageband (use the loop button in the toolbar with play, stop, etc. and set your loop area by dragging the edges of the yellow bar above the waveform) and you'll likely want to fine-tune your loops points before cutting and pasting your final product together. Likewise you'll probably want to make a number of these constructs — which can be pretty quickly thrown together — before deciding on the one that you want to present in workshop.
Your responses to this prompt should be in MP3 format — either as a SoundCloud link or an e-mail attachment — and should be exactly 30 seconds long. Please send your pieces to me (and me alone) by our class time on Friday, October 2nd. We'll go over these pieces in class on the 5th and 7th of October in a randomized order and you'll be encountering them for the first time in class, so you won't be writing comments ahead of time. You should, however, come prepared to discuss your peers' work on the fly.
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