Memory

Tonight as I was listening to some music from my old collection, I came across Indecent Obsession’s Fixing a Broken Heart. The memory from my teenage years couldn’t stop flowing after that. I started to rambling in Youtube and found the Lady Rain and so on.

Long time ago when I was still in junior high, my cousin gave an audio cassette for my sister. It was full of the top list music he taped from the radio. My sister and I were so in love with the tape that we played it over and over again. Another celeb-craving cousin came with the lyrics and the three of us sang the whole night together. I guess it was the first time I became so into music and lyrics in English. I was able to memorize all the lyrics of all the songs in that tape even though I didn’t speak English. I still even remember that the tape began with Take That - Back for Good, then Key to My Life from Boyzone (I was so crazy about Ronan Keating, thought he was the most good looking boy in the world, uh..oh..). I forget what came on the third track, but Julia Says came on fourth. Michael & the Mechanics was on the other side track. I mastered the whistling technique because of Over My Shoulder. Frente was also in that tape. I can’t remember the other songs, but believe me, it was the best tape I’d ever had. Well, even though it was a gift for my sister, but when I was little almost everything that belonged to my sister belonged to me too. Sadly the tape is gone now. I’m quite sure it was my sister’s fault. She liked to lend her stuffs to some friends that kept loosing her stuffs.

After that, I started to tape the music played on the radio by myself and I collected quite a lot. I mastered the radio taping technique pretty good. No clicking sound and no DJ talking. I knew the time when the DJ would play the whole complete song without talking in between or cut the song with some adverts. It was the midnight broadcasting. This also brought me to meet (I mean to listen to) Ivan, the DJ from Oz 103 fm who had a really soothing voice. I fell in love with his voice and always waited for him every single night. Still remember the way he said “Bye now” at the end of the show.

I also became obsessed with finding out the lyrics so that I could sing along with the songs. We didn’t have Internet and Google didn’t exist yet, so I had to work hard on it. I kept pushing the play-stop-rewind buttons just to be able to decipher and write the lyrics. I then created my own “English”.

One last memory. I also once really liked the song from Gary Barlow as he started going solo, Forever Love. My sister mocked me all the time because of Garry’s humming in some part of the song, that according to her, sounds like a dog howling. Ugh..ugh… no offense, Gary…

Experiment on Animal Sounds

made for completing one task I got from a class called Mapping.

The idea of this experiment is to classify the animal sounds into pitches. Just like human, animal also talks in various tones (different frequencies of voice).
We can grumble and produce low pitch sounds or we can clamor and produce high pitch sounds. Animal never talks in one tone only, which is why the sound that an animal produce is already “music” to me. Therefore I cannot classify each animal voice into an exact category of pitches.

But still, just like human, I think animal voice can be put into groups of vocal range too. Some animal talks in its natural low vocal range and some other has a higher vocal range. To compare it with the human voice, let’s say for instance, a lion growls in its bass voice and a rooster crows in its countertenor voice. That is how I classify the voices, based on their vocal range.

I could not find anyone made a research on animal’s vocal range or scientifically put it in voice category, therefore there is no scientific explanation for the classification I made in this experiment. It is just my idea of mapping the animal sounds and form some music from it.

The Notes
Since I'm not a musician nor have the sensitivity to distinguish notes, I will not draw a formula to show which sound is similar to which note. So there is no do-re-mi in this list of notes, just the names of the animals. I try to put them in order from the lower vocal range to the higher, but it will only be based on my own interpretation.
So these are the animal sounds I use in this experiment.



The Music
I didn't take all the "notes" to form the music, just some of them. Honestly, the result is not as good as I've imagined before and it is very short. I tried to make it longer, but I was stuck. I guess I'm just not creative enough to be a composer :)



PS:
The inspiration comes from my childhood memory. I was still in the Kindergarten when we learned how to play one traditional music instrument called angklung. This unique instrument can only perform a melody when it is played together with other angklung(s). Why? Because each angklung only holds one note. So, angklung is usually played by many people in an ensemble, with each person holds one instrument with one note.
Since we (at that time) did not know what musical note is, our teachers put an animal sticker on each instrument. Then they built the musical notation using the animal pictures too.
When the teacher points the picture of a duck, all children who hold the angklung with duck picture has to shake (play) their instrument. When the teacher points the bird, every kid who has the bird angklung takes their turn and shakes their angklung, and so on. That way, even some kindergartners who don't know how to read notation can perform a nice song.
This then bring me to the idea, that animals may represent notes.


Credits
All of the animal sounds are taken from:
http://www.animal-sounds.org/animal-sounds-free-download.html
http://www.a1freesoundeffects.com/animal.html
Software used:
GarageBand
Wavepad Trial Edition
Windows Movie Maker