Janet Cardiff response

I thought that the radio interview piece did a good job at conveying the essence of Janet Cardiff's work. Cardiff's "walks" not only take you on a journey through sound and space, but make you notice and appreciate the multitude of sounds in our everyday lives. In order to create parallels between her soundscapes and the listener's own life, Cardiff is intentionally vague about some situations, sounds, or thoughts that are presented in her works. By leaving some portions of the artwork to the listener's imagination, Cardiff makes people take an active role in her pieces by relating them to their own lives. In my opinion, artwork is only great when it makes you reflect on your own life, or the world you live in, and this is exactly what Janet Cardiff's work aims to do. Instead of just projecting her stories onto her listeners, Cardiff has created pieces that require participants to take an active listening role; although the different elements of a story or soundscape are in place, it is the listener's interpretation of those sounds that give them any meaning.

The three-level spatial structure can be clearly heard throughout Cardiff's White Chapel piece. The foreground sound is usually Cardiff's voice. Although it is often the loudest sound in any given portion of the work, you can also tell that it is in the foreground because it seems to be more out of place than any other sound. Although the voice is smooth and calming, it is also somewhat jarring because it seems like somebody else's thoughts are inside of your head as you take this "journey" with her. The ambient noises of birds chirping could be considered to be the background, as they are the most natural-sounding elements of the piece. Since the birds are a constant, lower-volume sound, they seem to be unimportant and as such are just background noise. The footsteps are not quite as loud as the voice, but are more prominent than the background noises, so they contribute to the middleground noises in the piece. Another thing that makes me think that the footsteps are meant to be part of the middleground is that they are consistently moving at the same pace, and the sound of them becomes quite monotonous after just a few minutes.

To be honest, I didn't really like the White Chapel piece very much. It's not that I didn't appreciate the artistic aspects of the work, it just made me feel generally uncomfortable. Being forced to listen to the sounds that she was making, and being trapped in the world that she had created made me feel very uneasy and even somewhat claustrophobic. I'm not sure exactly how to explain it, but there was something about not being able to go where I wanted to in her world that made me want to be able to leave it that much more. There was also something off-putting about the actual sounds that Cardiff chose to use in her piece. They all sounded too clean, too perfect. Every element of the narrative sounded like it came from a pre-recorded library, and the combination of these elements created a too-perfect world that I found extremely disconcerting.