USITT: Guerrilla Sound Challenge '13

A handful of UCI folk just got back from the annual USITT conference.  The conference is an annual gathering of theatre designers, stage managers, and technicians from around the country. For four days, we attend workshops, panel discussions, seminars, look at new products, and socialize with our colleagues around the country.  Mike and I go annually, and this year, Josh and Matt Eckstein were also there.

Every other year, the Sound Commission at USITT runs a program called the Guerrilla Sound Challenge, and this year, I took it over.  The GSC works like this: At a certain time, I give each participant a stimulus. That participant then has three hours to create an aural response to the stimulus. The trick is that they are not allowed to use any pre-recorded audio or music. Everything that goes into their aural response has to be wholly original.

This year, the stimulus was a 60-second video piece by video designer Daniel Vatsky. At 2.30pm last Friday, I passed the video clips out to nine different respondents, and they had three hours to create their response. The respondents this year represented a wide cross-section of the Sound Community at USITT.  We had undergraduate students, sound technology professionals, professors, and even a high school student!  The aural responses were wide, and I present them to you here:

















I was really pleased with how different each of these pieces are, and yet they still each are deeply connected with Vatsky's imagery.

If you're interested in participating in the Guerrilla Sound Challenge at USITT, you'll have to wait until the 2015 conference in Cincinnati!  But we'll see you then, for certain!

Track & Field

Back in a previous life as a web developer, Friday afternoons in the office were made a little more bearable thanks to a game called Layer Tennis.  In this game, two artists trade a Photoshop file back and forth every 15 minutes for 10 rounds. Each artist creates 5 banner images from a mashup of the previous rounds plus any other inspiration they care to draw from.

I'd long wondered how Layer Tennis would be played using sound instead of images.  I told Vinnie about the game, and we came up with a longform version for our Trends in Modern Sound Design class.  I'm calling it (sound) Track & Field (recordings).  It's one part Layer Tennis, one part Guerilla Sound, and one part Telephone Game.

We setup two teams: Stephen Swift, Josh Fehrmann, Brian Svoboda, David Backovsky; and Patricia Cardona, Matt Glenn, Mark Caspary, Michael Matthews.  Each week, the team's Pro Tools session would get passed to the next member in line like a baton in a relay race.  Each designer then had 1 hour to create a 30 second audio clip, which would get placed on the master track right after the previous clip ended.  For the first week, everyone created a 30 second sound clip as a jumping off point; so actually, each team was responsible for four Pro Tools sessions, and the one you were personally responsible for that week was just based on where you were in the rotation.

We've been going at this for seven weeks now, and collectively have generated a half-hour of audio: that's 8 relay games, each with seven 30 second sound clips strung together.  We've posted them here for your entertainment... Enjoy!


Group 1, Rotation 1: Stephen, Josh, Brian, David, Stephen, Josh, Brian



Group 2, Rotation 1: Patricia, Matt, Mark, Michael, Patricia, Matt, Mark



Group 1, Rotation 2: Josh, Brian, David, Stephen, Josh, Brian, David



Group 2, Rotation 2: Matt, Mark, Michael, Patricia, Matt, Mark, Michael



Group 1, Rotation 3: Brian, David, Stephen, Josh, Brian, David, Stephen



Group 2, Rotation 3: Mark, Michael, Patricia, Matt, Mark, Michael, Patricia



Group 1, Rotation 4: David, Stephen, Josh, Brian, David, Stephen, Josh



Group 2, Rotation 4: Michael, Patricia, Matt, Mark, Michael, Patricia, Matt