Digital Music & Sound Art under lockdown
and the possibilities are endless …
Imagine being a digital sound worker and the tools of your trade are locked away in inaccessible studio spaces.
Imagine your trusted cohort of fellow students and advisory staff are scattered all over the country.
And imagine that there is no hope of using the spaces the university provides – for which you have designed your installations.
Imagine that everything you relied on when you conceived your project is gone and you are left only with your mobile phone, your second-hand computer and the few sounds you managed to record before lookdown prevented you from lingering around at length at the one spot in which where you found your ideal sound.
Imagine your creativity being challenged in this way.
What to do you do with your ideas when at the crucial time of project realisation
- you are stuck in the Devon countryside with an empty barn, some chicken wire, plenty of rocks and water, and two lasers you managed to get hold of before lockdown?
Donald Watson: CHICKEN WIRE. Kinetic Sound:Light Installation
- you are stuck in a flat with only your mobile phone with which to realise your lofty ideas about a short movie, which you now have to shoot and edit on this tiny screen?
Javier Sarmiento: Doppelgänger. Short Film
- you are stuck in the bedroom of a shared flat with an ambitious concert project when the venue is closed and the audience quarantined?
Joshua Bell: Post-Substantial Self-Eliminatory Blues. Album & Live-Streamed Concert
- you are obsessed with an interactive installation for a chill-out room – when no clubs are open and the your room is too small to attempt even a mock-up?
Jack Idiens: unGround. Interactive Sound Installation
- you find yourself locked down and want to explore the concept of trauma, and need to find meaningful audio-visual expression for its various states?
Fraser Owen: Expurgation. Film in 4 Sections
- you long for simpler times and invent a dream-scape in which you feel safe and protected?
Angela Matthews: Starry Night. Room Scape
- you are all alone with a film plot and soundtrack clear in your head, but nobody around with whom to collaborate and make it real?
Matthew Tilston: The Night Train. Short Film
- your mind comes up with movie scenarios which find their way into pure audio theatre.
Daniel Crump: Become You. Radio Play
- you find yourself doing exactly what you like to do best: developing the soundscape for a video game in an online collaboration?
Jack Addison: Nugget Smash. Online Game
- an actual space in which to build your work is essential, as is an actual audience to experience it because no simulation could deliver the corporeal interaction integral to the concept? Perhaps, like Jordan McDermott you’d have to elaborate that concept [re: MOD_inst.fic.218643/… load], realise its various sonic and visual components and then wait for the time when post lockdown it can all actually be drawn together.
We salute all of our DMSA finalists, who were not deterred and have taken up the challenge to create this wide and imaginative variety of interesting work.
The DMSA staff team
How to apply for this course