Reverberations and the Sound of Our Voices
Reverberations and the Sound of Our Voices is a virtual community story-telling project focused on themes of identity and belonging. Using an online platform, this project involves audio and text stories based on the social locations of my identities. It invites listeners/readers to participate anonymously by echoing or sharing their own stories based on the same or similar social locations of their own identities. These stories will be accompanied by sound (and written sound descriptions) created by musician and noise artist Carmel Farahbakhsh.
Guided by the theme "Echolocation," this project uses aspects of both the scientific definition of the term "...the ability of humans to detect objects in their environment by sensing echoes from those objects, by actively creating sounds." As well as the language break down of the word "echo" and "location" to create an interactive web-based story-telling project which invites participants to listen and/or read (audio and written transcripts will be available) micro-stories based on the metaphoric locations of my identity. Participants are also invited to share their
stories via audio recording or text. By 'micro-stories based on locations of my identity,' I mean that I will create short audio clips (and transcripts) of stories relating to the following identity categories: Alive, Animal, Human, Immigrant, African, Black, Queer, Daughter, Sister, Friend, Omnivore, Non-Disabled, Cisgender, Woman. The audio clip of each category's stories will be accompanied by a music composition created by musician and noise artist Carmel Farahbakhsh. They will also be accompanied by invitations for the listeners to participate by echoing my story with stories of their own identity locations. For example, an invitation to share a story on the Black category would look like this: You are invited to share a story on the theme of your racial identity.
This will exist on a plain text minimalist website with audio playing, recording, and text typing functions for listening, reading, recording, and writing participation. I will create an Instagram account to describe, provide information, promote, and invite community members to participate in the project on August 24th. The project website will go live on September 24th so that interested participants may have three weeks until the evening before the main night on October 16th, listen/read, and share their own stories. On the 17th, the stories will be made available on the website, and select stories will be shared via Instagram Live. The story submission platform will be anonymous.
