Ellen Foreman
My soundscape, Soundscapes on Mi Vida, is an audio project that centers around the way that people from different Latin American cultures perceive their own culture through sound. While we were discussing the concept of the sonic color line, I came up with this idea for a project because I realized that when we think about a person, we sometimes don’t just think about the way they look, but the way their voice sounds. I thought it would be interesting to apply this idea more broadly, to cultures in general. For this project, I performed and arranged three popular folk songs for the piano and added a background layer of ambient sound and a foreground layer of poetry recitations.
The first selection is based on the Puerto Rican folk song Si me dan pasteles. While we were watching the video with the gamer showing us around Miles Morales’ house, I was fascinated by how the developers managed to incorporate so many visual aspects of his culture, from food to decorations. This selection makes use of many natural sounds, including the song of the coquí. The next selection is about Panama, which we didn’t discuss much in class, but I found that the folk song El Tambor de la Alegría was very charming. I decided that it would be interesting to actually use voices from Panama for the background layer audio, after thinking back on how much meaning the simple conversations that we listened to featuring Puerto Ricans and landlords held. Finally, for the last selection, I focused on Gracias la a Vida, a song by Chilean folk singer and activist Violeta Parra. Since we held a few discussions on social justice throughout this semester, I thought it would be appropriate to include her work on this piece as well.
For the poetry portion of this project, I was heavily inspired by the Afterlife of Illegality by Alan Pelaez Lopez. In a way, my project is structured the same as this work – it moves abruptly from section to section, and, just as the Afterlife of Illegality has poetry written in different shapes, sometimes upside down, sometimes in different languages, my poetry features several cadences so that the poetry can work more smoothly with the folk songs being performed. After considering what we had discussed in our conversations about platicás, I realized that it was important for my poetry to be as simple as possible in order to convey emotions but still let the music make the statement. Sometimes, I incorporated the words of the folk song into the poetry, but I was also inspired by the work of poets from the respective countries.
Overall, this project is meant to showcase the optimistic outlook of Latin American artists – we look forward, dream gloriously, and aim to break generational cycles of hardship and grief that have affected our brothers and sisters throughout the world.
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