Sewon Park – LO-04

A piece of sound art that has inspired me is Samson Young’s “Nocturne”. I believe that the most important value of art is the message that it conveys to its audience. Nocturne is a groundbreaking project that incorporates both sound and visual effects to recreate the many aspects of the U.S bombings of the Middle East.

The visual component of the project includes a 6 hour film created through piecing together difference clips from news, radio, and youtube videos. The film is mute and the sounds are replaced by the array of household objects that Young brings in. He conducts research to find sounds that most accurately represents the original sound from the video and makes the coordination between the sounds and the film flawless through digital/manual coordination. His artistic sensibility is evident by the resemblance of the sounds produced by household objects to the one of the battlefields.

Young also draws his methods from the historical tactics of Ghost Army, who used their own tactics for deception during war. They recorded combat sounds and employed fake radio transmissions to confuse enemies. Young used similar algorithms to coordinate the sounds to the film.