For this open-ended assignment, I decided to revisit sound. After creating a narrative piece the first go around, I felt it would better serve my artist statement to try something more abstract. To keep a coherent theme, I decided to use an audio source I had in absolute abundance: Videos of my dogs.
The core of the track is the snoring of my childhood dog, Buster. I don't have many videos of him on my current phone, but I made sure to save his familiar, comforting rumble, and I built the rest of the audio around it. My other two dogs, Tess and Ruthie, are alive and well (though getting on in years in Tessie's case!) and I had much more to work with for both of them.
Initially, I only wanted to create something musical, building a beat out of the sounds I had. That alone left something to be desired, though, and I felt that going full tilt with the musical element would go against my stated goal of making my art more weird.
After adding my own voice speaking to the dogs in question, I felt that I'd created something of an auditory collage, with the focus shifted from "sounds my dogs make" to "the relationship I have with my dogs."
I feel that there's something oddly vulnerable about exposing the way you speak to your pets. So many of us get so very silly with them, and it's not usually a side of us we show to the broader public.
All in all, I feel I accomplished my goal with this work. Seeing as it's not a visual art, it's definitely outside my comfort zone, and I pushed myself to make something with a meaning that I feel is open to interpretation. Obviously I love my dogs. That part isn't in question. But there's more to unpack here than just that, and that's what I was striving for.
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