YOU LIM YI
LOCATION
Library Silent Study Booth. CCT Building, UTM Campus, Mississauga ON
Description of Project
For this final sound project, I tried to slow down a little bit and wanted it to have more relaxed feeling which is quite different from my previous works. While the two other works sound more abstract and complicated with modified sound layers, this sound piece portrays a sense of stillness and calmness by having more raw recordings with a very little touch and slowly building up the climax at a slow pace. The location I chose is a silent zone, more specifically one of the carrel desks designed for individual study or reading, at UTM library. The reason why I chose the location is because the place is where I spend most of time studying and doing my assignments whenever I go to the campus. I often feel the space is idiosyncratic after quite a while staying at such a narrow and blocked area. Although the area is made to encourage people’s concentration but it suddenly becomes disguised as having a lot of interrupters such as flashing ceiling lightings, people whispering, and even the pattern of the desk. I usually listen to the music or ASMRs like white noises while studying because it helps me focus on studying. When I pay attention to the study, I cannot hear anything even a song playing through earbuds so I transformed the recording of the noise in the library into the underwater sound which refers to my stream of consciousness focusing deeply on readings. I put short parts of my favorite song with some gaps because that is the way I hear the music when studying. I also add a few layers of mumbling since I tend to repeat texts what I have to understand or memorize but in the silent zone, I cannot speak out loud so I do it myself in my head, which I found that is sometimes more disrupting. Sadly, my concentration does not last very long and gets distracted so easily by surroundings. The sound of phone vibrating is the metaphor of my consciousness gradually being disturbed. When I cannot concentrate, every sounds people or objects make and things that I see become a huge distracting factors. After a few minutes of wandering, I suddenly become concentrated again and I express this by ending this piece with white noises. I want listener to follow the flow of my consciousness and possibly to have a sense of confusion of hearing the sound piece or the real background noises in the silent zone.