Two Sound Pieces

Keith Dorwick

These two sound works gathered here ("At the Edge of Sleep" and "For Voices, No Longer Human") were assembled out of ordinary, even mundane sounds. In each, I slowed down the tempo of the original sound cues such as a cat eating kibbles or a voice uttering nonsense. Further manipulation of the sounds to make entirely new pieces created abstract sound landscapes, if you will, that take on (I hope) a mythic quality far removed from their original sources. In the case of "For Voices, No Longer Human," Harlot's review process resulted in a whole new (and much stronger) work, and the supplanted version of that work originally submitted for review ("Implausible, for Voices") is included in order to demonstrate how sound works can be reworked, sometimes beyond recognition.

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Keith Dorwick is an associate professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and editor of the online journal Technoculture. Sometimes a rhetorican teaching new media and children's media, he also paints and makes media pieces including these two works for sound. One of his colleagues once described a creative work of his as "good, but disgusting," and his work involving appropriations of Greek and Roman myth has sometimes been shown in adult only rooms of exhibitions, though he doesn't quite understand why. Go to his website for links to more of his work.