When I try replaying some piece of memory, the colors may not be correct, dialogues are sometimes non-sense, or even just just white noises. Those memories are made of 30% of oblivion, 20% of imagination and alteration, and maybe 50% of truth at the time. The imagination applied to the memory sort of serves sort of as a dithering noise (a technique used in digital audio processing to acquire less-distorted audio quaitliy), smoothing the memory and altering it more to the thing that we prefer to keep as a memory. It’s the dithering noise that I’d like to make.
Essentially I’d like to make a box that contains all the memory segments that I’ve picked from my life, and dissect them into these following elements:
People: sound source; I think I’d prefer abstract and non-human sounds,
Event: the “what happened”; in the sound context, maybe a sound meet another sound, then they cancel each other out or modulation, etc.
Location: where event happens; two memory segments could interfere each other if they come two close due to the noise.
When fed into the box, these elements will be affected by the noise produced by machine. The users can decide how much they want the noise and alternations to be.
Questions:
1. I feel like visual elements that corresponds to the audio might be helpful, anyone here familiar jitter? Or noise manipulation ideas for videos?
2. This idea is still in a concept phase, would very much appreciate it if there’s any suggestions on the actual form and interaction.
Influence:
Mike Kelley – Educational Complex
Sound Material, Sound Art 
Hi Ziyun,
I love the idea of exploring noise in the context of memory. I’m not sure if it is what you mean, but in my mind there is this sort of ‘signal-to-noise’ ratio going on between what is real, crisp, clear, and what has begun to decay, distort, etc. thanks to our imperfect memories. If this is an interactive machine, I wonder about the possibility of exploring ‘memories’ of people who visit the installation (in real life, or virtually, perhaps), instead of only your own. Off the top of my head, one way you might approach this is in using social media. One example that comes to mind is this piece:
http://www.henryart.org/exhibitions/exhibition/1184
Anyway, I imagine it could be very compelling either way…whether it is more introspective, like a self-portrait, or not. Can’t wait to see where you go with this!
-Abby
This sounds cool! My biggest question for you is about the “event” segment. It sounds like there are a lot of different ways you could interpret that segment as far as distilling actual moments into a single defining sound (which I think is what you’re trying to do). Which ways were you thinking about going about this? As for your questions, I personally am not particularly skilled at Jitter. However, I think that your overall concept is strong so far, I’d just recommend choosing specific criteria defining each of your elements to a greater extent, to ensure that they don’t overlap.
(oh and this is jake)