Good morning, and happy Thursday to you all! The past couple weeks have been challenging for all of us, and I have to say I’ve learned a lot about how much I actually miss the ambient noises of everyday urban life from being locked in my home with little more than the sounds of air conditioning, the sorrowful news emanating from my family’s television set, and the sound of my computer’s keypad as a type my way through all of my classes. The difference in noise level from traffic sounds coming from the highway located a mile from my house is also noticeable. And it is for that reason, that the sounds and the overall experience of Ride were a nostalgic experience, reminding me of what life was like in the not so distant past.
Overall, the piece reminds me quite a lot of El Tren Fantasma, a piece reviewed in a previous blog post. This is especially true in the sense that both works comprise of industrial sounds whooshing past the listener in what feels like a ride through various settings. In the case of El Tren Fantasma, the primary contrast throughout the piece was between the industrial sounds of urban areas and the natural sounds of rural areas, both of which would be encountered in the course of a train ride. Yet, in Ride, the primary mode of contrast was between the industrial sounds of urban life and the more intimate sounds of a more contrived idiom of musical expression—specifically with the sounds of recognizable musical instruments.
Some moments that best illuminated that contrast in my listening experience were the pairing of the sound of a string section and horns around the 5:30 mark. The strings emerge from a blend of airy noises in a very seamless way. This string sound becomes a motif reappearing around 15:30. I also really enjoyed the synthesizer-like sounds at 7:30; they reminded me of the sounds in the underwater parts of Super Mario 64, one of my favorite video games. Perhaps the intended effect was to transport audiences back to an earlier time. If this is true, then ride isn’t only a journey through space, but also through time. Possibly the most evocative part of the my listening experience was the result of a technological glitch. At 14:39 in the middle of a crescendo, the sound file suddenly paused. The effect was jarring—as though the ride had suddenly come to an end. It felt, in a sense, like the experience of a sudden car crash, or in a more figurative sense, a life suddenly cut short. After perhaps a minute, I realized that this was not supposed to be, and, finding the sound file paused, finished listening to the piece.
Going forward, I’m excited to begin a new project which sill occupy the rest of this semester. It was quite difficult to think of a piece that would be meaningful and which I could produce with the sounds available from my home and which will be satisfactorily distinct from my planetarium piece. My idea is an arrangement of the prayer “Hail Mary.” The prayer has a distinct rhythmic character that is recognizable even when divorced from the words. As such, my plan is to repeat the prayer several times with different rhythmic sounds and to conclude with a plainly spoken version of the prayer with my voice. The prayer would be especially meaningful in the present times, amid the darkest days (yet) of the coronavirus pandemic. A link to a video description of this project is posted below:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/16EMUSZxlXkkFd5c8iQF19IkTDROUDa2I/view?usp=sharing
The Unquestioned Answer 