Cora's blog

The recording part is also full of diffcultities, the environment and hardwares are hard to adjust, is only myself that is largely adjustable.

I have recorded the video of me speaking while listening to the video but it was over the maxium storge.

With headphoen/without

Speak seating down / stand up

Make the sound source behind the me / surrounded me

Make the sound keep repeating/ once a while

Make the sound from loud to quite and repeadly / only the first time and rest keep the same volume

Make it in the closed space/open space

With experiment, I realize it is diffcult to actually speak while the noises are filled my ears. I tried to be both the scientist and the subject today. The experiment was simple: record myself listening to the cacophony I built—the jump-scare bleeds, the washing machine’s monstrous groan, the stalking drip—while simultaneously trying to tell a coherent, pre-written story into a second microphone. I thought I could perform it. I was wrong.

For the first twenty seconds, it was manageable. I heard my own voice in my head, narrating the opening lines about a childhood memory. Then, on cue in my composition, the first clustered sonic attack hit. The microwave’s digital shriek pierced my left ear, the pan sizzle spat in my right, and a glitched knife chop stuttered in the centre. My voice didn’t just falter; it physically jumped. A stutter, a gasp for air I didn’t need. I lost my place on the script. My eyes scanned the words, but the sentence had shattered. I could see the next line, but I couldn’t assemble its meaning. The cognitive pathway between reading and speaking was severed by a wall of noise.

I pushed on. This was the point, after all. But the deeper horror wasn’t the loud moments—it was the ambient dread in between. The low, time-stretched hum of the appliances, the paranoid panning of the fridge buzz jumping between my ears. This wasn’t sound I could ignore; it was sound that demanded a low-grade, constant psychic surveillance. My brain wasn’t listening to it; it was tracking it. Where is the drip now? Is the buzz about to jump? When will the next slam come? This background tracking consumed the RAM of my mind. The part of my brain needed for threading narrative, for emotional recall in the story, was fully occupied with threat assessment.

I finished the three-minute take. My story was a hollow, fractured thing. I sounded robotic in the calm patches, desperately rushing before the next sonic wave, and utterly shattered in the aftermath of the shocks. The emotion of my childhood memory was gone, replaced by the raw emotion of the present: frustration, anxiety, and a profound sense of incompetence.

And here is where the true, chilling empathy clicked into place. This wasn’t just a successful simulation of distraction. This was a tiny, controlled taste of the erosion of self. If I, in a 3-minute performance, could feel my interiority—my memory, my narrative voice—be so utterly dismantled by a pre-recorded soundtrack, what is the cumulative effect of a lifetime of the real thing? The real demands aren’t predictable loops in Ableton. They are live, urgent, and carry emotional consequences. A baby’s cry isn’t just a sound; it’s a need. A timer isn’t just a beep; it’s a burning pot.

My frustration wasn’t a failure of the experiment. It was the data. For the first time, I didn’t just understand the theory of fragmented attention and mental load intellectually; I felt it as a neurological reality. The “invisible labour” isn’t just the physical act of cleaning. It’s the constant, high-stakes cognitive hijacking that makes sustained thought a privilege. The voice that gets lost isn’t just an audible one; it’s the quiet, continuous inner voice that constructs a coherent self. I wasn’t just mimicking interruption. I was, for three minutes, experiencing the silent violence of having your own mind colonised by the needs of a space. The housewife’s ultimate labour is fighting this colonization, every single day, and my failed recording is the proof of its brutal efficiency.

I have input all sound I have collect into the track and experimenting them to form a disrubing sound effect, test to what degress it can punctuated, echoed, delayed, and eventually obscured to people. I actually wanted to create the most realiable environment that imitate the actual day of what the domestic wife will going through, but I do realize that my life was so much far away from the research target that I wanted to explore into. In the future development, I need to do more interviews with the housewifes.

Phase 1: Sound Mangling
Before I could arrange, I had to destroy the familiar. I spent a day in Ableton warping my field recordings. The 2-second spin of the washing machine, stretched over 16 bars with Complex Pro warp, became a groaning, metallic lung—a slow exhalation of exhaustion. The rice cooker warning, reversed, lost its demand and became a ghostly, sucking inhalation. It felt wrong in a primal way. Pitching the cabinet slam up 19 semitones transformed it from wood to a brittle snap, like a breaking bone. These aren’t household sounds anymore; they’re the emotional fossils of the labour.

Phase 2: Arrangement – The Architecture of Anxiety
My goal is to build a soundscape that feels both predictable and violently unstable.

• The Gaslighting Rhythm: I built a loop from four sounds: knife chop, pan sizzle, knife chop, cabinet slam. It ran for 30 seconds, establishing a false sense of order. Then, I used Ableton’s master tempo automation to gradually speed it up by 8 BPM. The body tries to follow, but can’t. The rhythm crumbles into arrhythmic chaos—a sonic metaphor for a plan derailed.
• The Paranoid Panorama: Static placement feels safe. So, I automated everything. The drip from the tap now slowly traverses the stereo field over a full minute using an automated pan. It’s not a drip; it’s a patrol. On the constant fridge hum, I inserted an Auto-Pan set to a square wave at 0.10 Hz. Every 10 seconds, the sound violently jumps from the left speaker to the right. It’s disorienting, suggesting a fractured mind.
• The Cognitive Overload Cluster: The horror isn’t in one sound, but in their simultaneous, inescapable demand. I created a moment where five sounds hit at once: the washing machine drone (left), the raw microwave bleep (centre, loud), the grainy sound of scrubbing (right), a stuttered knife rhythm, and a distant, reverbed cry. It’s not a sequence of tasks; it’s all tasks at once. The listener’s brain can’t parse it—they feel the overwhelm.

Phase 3: Dynamics & The Voice
The final weapon is contrast. After a dense section, I drop everything to near silence for 10 seconds. The only sound is the down-pitched, sub-bass rumble of the fridge—a physical vibration more than a tone. It’s the dread in the quiet. Into this silence, my spoken narrative—recorded intimately, close-mic’d—tries to emerge. It’s clear for a sentence. Then, the first jump-scare bleep hits, causing the voice to flinch in the recording. I use a gate side-chained to the domestic sounds; every time a “shock” sound peaks, it ducks the volume of my voice, physically suppressing it in the mix. The story doesn’t just get covered; it gets attacked.

The arrangement is complete. It’s not a song; it’s an environment. A trap. The familiar has been weaponized into a chorus of interruption, and the voice of the self is fighting a losing battle to be heard above it. The labour is no longer invisible; it is inescapable.

After I see my weakness with the last meeting I have immediately did more research and improved my idea

I start to go back to the beginning and think about the root of why I want to create this piece and I was only thinking about how can I express my idea through presentation.

I consider that I should experiment into all of these ideas, in which I was majorly explored in idea number 3, I started to record all the house funiture that I will work with in a day with zoom XYH-5, I have record with simply each by each, and all the noises are coming from houseworks, which could be caual but also annoying sometimes.

I intened to record the dish washer, it was recorded from the outside, and this sound was unexpectedly peaceful but in fact it was very loud when I sitting in the room.

Then I changed my idea and recorded my rice cooker, which it was a very sharp noise with intention of reminding the user to check it when it is done. However, it is super distrubing and it can be repeated or even goes overcook if the user don’t check it on time, I could’t imaging how much house wife have to handle in a day since there are so much noise happening in once.

Orginally I have finalize my idea and had my first tutorial with my tutor, however this idea was lack of experience and evidence supported, in which I have then received many feedback.

I have look into the book “Domesticating the Airwaves: Broadcasting, Domesticity and Femininity” and summarized it

Introduction: Setting the Stage

The introduction establishes the book’s central thesis: that radio broadcasting was not a neutral technology but was actively “domesticated.” It was integrated into the heart of the home and became a tool for reinforcing a specific, middle-class ideal of domesticity and femininity. Andrews argues that the BBC, under its first Director-General John Reith, consciously crafted a “National Family” of listeners, with the home as its primary listening context and the housewife as its primary daytime consumer.

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Chapter 1: The Creation of the Housewife-Listener

This chapter focuses on the early days of the BBC and how it constructed its audience. Andrews shows how the BBC’s programming schedule and content implicitly defined the ideal listener. Daytime programming was aimed directly at women in the home, with formats like advice shows, household tips, and light music. This created the archetype of the “housewife-listener,” a woman whose domestic work was accompanied and guided by the radio. The chapter establishes how broadcasting helped to define and consolidate the modern housewife’s role.

Chapter 2: The Radio Wife and the Invention of the Domestic Expert

Here, Andrews analyzes the specific voices used to speak to women. She introduces figures like the “Radio Doctor” and, most importantly, the “Radio Housewife” or domestic advice presenter (e.g., Mabel Constanduros). These broadcasters acted as friendly experts, blending companionship with instruction. This chapter explores how these personas created a new form of authority—the media domestic expert—who entered the private home to advise on everything from cooking and cleaning to child-rearing and budgeting.

Chapter 3: A National Family: Domesticating the World

This chapter expands the view from the individual home to the nation. Andrews argues that the BBC used domestic imagery to make large-scale national and imperial events relatable. The monarchy, for instance, was presented as a “family,” with royal broadcasts (like the King’s Christmas message) becoming a domestic ritual for the “national family.” In this way, the public world was brought into the private sphere and made sense of through a domestic and familial lens.

Chapter 4: Femininity, Domesticity and the World of Work

Andrews complicates the image of the purely domestic woman by examining how radio dealt with women’s work. During World War II, this became especially pertinent as women entered the workforce in unprecedented numbers. The chapter analyzes how programming addressed the tensions between women’s traditional domestic roles and their new public, wartime duties. It shows how radio was a key site for negotiating these changing identities.

Chapter 5: The Domestication of Drama and Comedy

This chapter looks at specific genres: radio drama and comedy. Andrews argues that popular serials and sitcoms (like The Archers, which began during this period, and other family-based comedies) placed domestic life at the center of entertainment. These programs reinforced normative ideas about family relationships, gender roles, and the humorous trials of domestic life, making the everyday happenings of the home a subject of national storytelling.

Chapter 6: The Female Listener and the Critics

Not everyone accepted the BBC’s domestic ideal. This chapter explores the critiques of radio’s focus on domesticity. Critics from both the political left and right, as well as some feminist voices, argued that this programming was either intellectually stifling or socially conservative. Andrews uses these critiques to show that the “domestication” of the airwaves was a contested process, not a seamless one.

Chapter 7: The Challenge of Television

The final chapter looks forward to the post-war era and the rise of television. Andrews argues that television did not simply replace radio but forced it to redefine its relationship with domesticity. As TV became the new focal point of the living room, radio adapted by becoming more portable (the transistor radio) and developing new formats (like music-based and talk-based shows), which began to move listening out of the collective family space and into more personal, individual spaces.

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Conclusion: The Enduring Legacy

The conclusion reiterates the book’s main argument: that radio played a fundamental role in constructing and maintaining the 20th-century ideal of the domestic, private sphere and the woman’s place within it. Andrews emphasizes that this was a two-way process; women listeners were not just passive recipients but actively used and interpreted radio content within their own lives. The legacy of this period, she concludes, continues to influence how media targets and conceptualizes the home and the female audience today.

I was very amazed by the development of domestic wife in the United Kingdom, but I was more surprised by the data of many domestic wife has actually consider it is very helpful. Despite that I understood there is period difference, but I have realize my bias towards domestic wife from this book. In my understanding I always thought that domestic wifes are being suppressed and they will consider the radio as another sign of discrimination, but the fact is that in that age background when women don’t hold many power to change their destiny, this audio might be a more practical way to help them out with their labour.

Listening and not listening to voices : Interrogating the prejudicial foundations of the sound arts canon. Audio Paper published in Seismograf

Listening and not listening to voices : Interrogating the prejudicial foundations of the sound arts canon. Audio Paper published in Seismograf (listening, write analysis of about it, what did you find what you listened and not listened) 

Notes I took while I’m listening to this: 

When it first started it was repeating the words and adding echos to some of them, the sound effect gives a good intro

Who’s voice might not listening to? Does sound not matter?

She uses left and right channel to perform this work, where she put her mother’s voice on right channel, and her own speech on the left

She’s trying to explain her reason of why she’s not hearing from her mother, she said “I need space” where that’s been overlapping and repeated in the background

Why is our voice in these certain ways, sonic activism to make our culture pluralistic, educate ourself listen better and listen new 

In this paper, why not our voices in so many ways, my own sound journey, emergency of sound art, how sound art needs to be a place where there are plural verse voices to be heard rather than the voices that are heard.  

Arthur explained that while she is listening to her mother, she is the most benefited person but she feels uncomfortable, because it demands time and energy, and she has other things to do (after this she asks herself “am l listening to her?”) (this is used as a connecting sentence, as well as leading to the next topic she’s going to focus on)

In sound art we listening to field recording, nature and all sound elements, objects, forms of matter than people

Whose voices are we listening to? And are able to hear what lies beneath the word? Do we have a choice? Are we only listening to our own voice and who are we?

Women are assumed to be like weak animals, where it is forbidden to have voice in broadcast at all, some principles are against female voices in sport, news and most particularly music.

At the moment there are still majorly white male cannaive sound art.but female provide love sound, they are contributing to building to maintain this canon, how is only focusing on white male (keep echoing for the key words and the question) 

Are we able to hear what lies beyond our words? How are we as a group in prisoning ourselves behind our language? How can we hear beneath surfaces the visible, visible in the case might be rare, obvious then the easy, what language we adopt of the discord of the sound art, is that language, the traps in the known. 

Fossa, by Amy Cutler

This section will examine Amy Cutler’s Fossa from the perspectives of its invisibility, interactivity, and intimate texture. The soundscape by Emily Wells effectively illustrates how the materiality of sound can critique the misogynistic erasure of domestic labor and redefine the gallery as a space of ethical, embodied encounter. The central mechanism of the project is a feminist acoustic intervention: geological models composed of human hair produce localized, pre-recorded home noises, such as the clink of china or the scratch of a pen, only when a viewer approaches. (Burleigh, 2025) By rejecting the historical silence placed on women’s labor, this interactive sonic materiality directly criticizes misogyny. Instead of being background noise, the private, monotonous, and psychologically draining sounds of maintenance are concentrated as the work’s throbbing core, sonifying the massive but unseen labor that sustains the social order. The piece also deftly redefines the politics of the listening environment. The gallery becomes an activated arena where the viewer is made complicit, rather than a place of isolated visual contemplation. Audiences are unable to watch from a safe distance as your body moves through the room, acting as an unintentional activator of these auditory memories. The audience is made intensely aware of their existence within a system of historical monitoring and disruption through this forced connection, which produces a charged, relational space. Instead of broadcasting in public, the sounds come from a particular, hair-lined “fossa” (a trench or ditch), providing a private, almost confessional acoustic space that one must lean into to physically replicate the act of listening for the voice of the disadvantaged. This sound installation’s use of space has significantly challenged the patriarchal devaluation of the household, as well as the misogynistic assumption that women are the domestic workers. 

Time period: 9 months to do it 

Direction, why you are here, which road you are leading

Essay or audio paper – til late february

Link research project to portfolio in that way

Two project for portfolio unit 

Dissertation 

Working progress, there is exhibition opportunity (feb/march) 

Writing, making, testing do it at the same time (keep trying and record them)

During the writing, catch the idea and play things with it, setting habit for the behavior and benefit for the future (make it as a continue) 

Idea: installation sound – maybe sand plate, for people to interact/just test one sound 

Zimoun (need example, sound element/principle, research into sound models, try various controllers. (maybe continue the healing and mental disorder) 

• Grabbing how much sand is how loud they could hear the sound 
• Therapy sound for mental disorders 
• Setting a closed space with boxes(reverb materials) that could echo the sound created inside 
• Water inside the cup and in different notes (as the therapeutic music) 
• Actual problem to solve – try to find one
• 骨传导声音
• Adapting the sound/echoing the sound back to the audience 

Course padlet: on moodle, just share

If there is any book that utilize it as a group then email annie 

Academic support – 

Counselling, health advice & chaplaincy 

Sound and music social dark room – 10.16

Year tutor – 3 times a year (20 mins) with milo

Two tutor for block 1 and 2

Resubmission is not working in year 3  – if you have reason they can be having an extension (but try not to) (be very careful with the submission!!!!) (check every detail) 

New this year – added into Unit Assignments

• Important: If you use any generative Al tools to produce this assignment, or any parts of it, you must provide a statement detailing how you used Al in your work and an appendix of Al prompts in the format (Platform/software, date, “prompt inputted”). You should retain a copy of prompts and responses in the event the assessor(s) require(s) more information. See UAL’s Student Guide to generative Al, the Cite Them Right generative Al (Harvard) referencing Guide & UAL guidance on Academic Misconduct & Plagiarism. (statement of how did you use the AI and an appendix of ai) 

Portfolio E1:

12.4 prototype of the work should be submitted 

• Document in my research blog (10 min entries)
• Completed proposal (x2 future portfolio pieces)
• 10 mins presentation (in class)

(if you can finish one, you can start to do another two piece, three as a total portfolio) 

Assessment briefing before handing in

Research project & portfolio tutor, 2 different tutors

E2:

Produce the final portfolio

5.14 final work

• Two portfolio works 
• A written accompaniment: containing element A-D (PDF)
• In class presentation (15 mins) 

If the tutor meets you don’t know what to communicate the you can tell them earlier and rearrange the time, but if you just don’t show up or have nothing to say then it is a waste.

Practice-based research 

Part 1: creating a body of work 

Focus on process – how does doing the work making you feel, steps by steps

Experimenting, reflecting (making and doing) 

Writing and doing your research (recording down your instant thought) 

Give chance for idea to flow

Part 2: choosing an avatar and modelling the journey