Process Piece

A Wedding.

A Wedding, By Camden and Pepe.

We considered that the best way for us to approach the piece was by telling a story, and that way explore sound as a storytelling device. By creating our own process we wanted the audience to imagine vividly the situation we were portraying.

Human behavior can be very unpredictable and there are times in which emotions take over entirely, to the point that someone can be irrational. A wedding was a perfect environment for a man to get completely blinded by his emotions.

We are all familiar with weddings, and most people understand the process. Of course it is a different approach according to the culture, but in our globalized world everyone knows and understands the methodology of a western wedding.

The way we created the setting was by using the common and well known elements of a wedding. To create this environment we mixed sounds of crowds in different spaces and then by adding Mendelssohn wedding march it becomes clear that the setting is a wedding.

Another important part of the process, is the couple walking down the aisle which was easy to achieve because once the setting is well put together everything else comes into place, by adding the sound of steps we described this micro process. It is easy to imagine a couple walking down the aisle of a church, people whispering in the background and the officiating clergy standing at the end of the aisle ready to receive the couple and start the ceremony. The first part of the process wasn’t hard to do because everyone completes the story with the images of what they have seen before, adding the priest commencing the ceremony follows the expected pattern of the process.

Weddings are one of those moments in which people tend to have high expectations. Turning this happy occasion into a disastrous event was our way to experiment with the power of sound to create a new world in which everything can happen. The wedding was interrupted, we used our own voices to create different characters and added more background sounds to rise the tension and maintain the environment. The interruption is the catalyst for everything that happened later. We used our voices not only to create the main characters, but also to give personality to the audience. The unintelligible sound of the crowd is mixed with some audible voices and eventually the ring falling becomes a tool for the protagonist to make his intentions clear, once he explains what he wants, we get to the climax. By the end, the story has a little comedic twist, this made the process somewhat unexpected and entertaining.

Silent cinema tells stories with moving pictures, when the audience receives those images their minds can add the sound that the picture lacks. Sound can also be structured in a way that has the same effect as a moving picture, we only need to provide the sounds, the brain creates the images.