My response to the radio interview with Janet Cardiff

Before I clicked into the radio interview, I expected it to be a talk between the artist and the DJ. However, after I played the clip, I found it more like an introduction program of the artist. Janet Cardiff is a Canadian artist. Frankly, I like this interview very much. It’s because the closeness of sound brought me to another world, the world of Janet Cardiff. At the beginning, they just talked about the daily journeys that Cardiff may bring listeners to. When listeners pressed the “Play” button of her audio CD, they have to “surrender” and be absolute obedience to what she told us to do. For example: let’s walk down the stairs, blah blah... or even instruct the listeners to press “Stop” button at the end of the clip. Listeners walk into the world, which partially belongs to them. My favorite part of her audio was her voice. Her flat tone voice narrated the journeys and the stories that she composed. Especially with the aid of her 3-level spatial structure, listeners can have closer contact to the sound, and the technology device human ear processes make sound in her work intense and vivid. When Cardiff talks, her voice is so close as it is coming out from my head.

She may bring listeners to relaxing natural environment, but she may also bring listeners to travel through time and space to the past, revealing the actual scene of history. In the interview, they played a short clip of her work “The missing voice”, which is probably about the situation of London during WWII. She is able to bring sense of memories and danger to listeners. In my opinion, she is like writing a novel in an audio way. She tries to make listeners experience what she experiences, and try to make connections between individuals, which is quite meaningful and interesting. She mentioned one point that I totally agree with, she said people tends to filter out 90% of sound around us in our daily life. That is also my ambition in my audio project, to find out the sounds that may easily neglected and bring them together in my journey.
After listening to this interview, I would like to know more about this artist. I will try to browse for her art works and post some opinion after doing that.