House of Dreams

The human mind is an incredible creative force, and in dreams we often see and experience that force firsthand, allowing for incredible journeys to alien landscapes, emotional encounters with people we may or may not know, or surreal visions of familiar places. The way our minds handle the concept of house and home in dreams is the inspiration of this work, using recorded interviews about dreams and the recorded sounds of each interviewee’s living space with minimal processing, to create a long piece of sound art that flows with the sequence of each house dream. The piece is split into three parts, a pleasant dream, a nightmare, and a surreal dream, and features recordings from Tivoli, NY, Tulum, Mexico, and New York City, and dreams from my girlfriend, my good friend in Rome, and myself. As an electronic musician, my instrument is my computer, and while this affords me a huge number of processing and editing options for my work including time stretching my sounds, I chose instead to avoid the shortcuts and loopholes possible in digital processing and instead took long recordings, often as long as the piece itself. I then edited these recordings for time and played a grain sampler over the entirety of the piece at select moments, adding a live element to the piece as well. The interviewees that made this possible are Chelsea Michaelis and Marcel Reid-Jaques, and I am grateful to them for their participation in this Senior Project