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welcome back to sweet stories in the dell it's a podcast about what makes sweet prayer college truly unique my name is caperton morton i'm an audio storyteller and a sweet bar alum sweetbriar is a liberal arts women's college in virginia located in the foothills of the blue ridge mountains the entire campus is over 3 200 acres of rolling hills fields and forests and it's all so beautiful in this bonus episode i introduced joshua harris my name is josh harris i'm an assistant professor of music at sweetwater college i actually had the pleasure of sitting right next to josh during our conversation because last january i spent three weeks at sweetwire gathering interviews for the podcast and boy am i glad i had that time on campus since then concerns about covid19 prompted sweetwire to transition to remote learning like most other schools when josh arrived on campus six years ago he began introducing technology and sound design into sweetwire's music program this evolution has opened up new avenues for study and career choices the performing arts department is in the babcock fine arts center home to the music program and it's a nice walk to that into campus one of the paths there runs along the bottom of the dell the namesake of the podcast hello hey this is brianna ray brianna hey oh cool we've just been going through um receipts from our trip to sundance their class trip to sundance is a big deal and it comes back up later on in the spring of 2016 sweetbriar entered a chegg incorporated contest and if you don't know chag is an online resource for students that offers grants and scholarships too the contest price was a concert with rachel platten so sweetwire supporters everywhere rallied voting every day for a month and out of the 2500 school entrants our small college out in the country actually won the contest the reason i bring any of this up is because winning the chegg contest also meant that sweet bar received the david b goldberg music grant worth ten thousand dollars now i had no idea who david goldberg was so i looked him up he had been the ceo of surveymonkey and it seems he was quite passionate about music sadly in 2015 david died unexpectedly but his passion for music became a catalyst that really inspires students at sweetbriar and the music faculty we each pitch you know what we would do with the money and um you know i was fortunate that my proposal was chosen to to institute a studio a space for creating electronic music it's called the sound art production and analysis studio or sarpa for short and josh is the studio's director that's a professional setup tell me about it the idea was was to provide students with the technology and the gear to be as creative as they could be and so i don't have any specific intentions for how to use the space but i wanted to have lots of tools there for students for whatever they they could imagine so we've got software that lets us program so that we can create musical instruments from scratch like we've built synthesizers and samplers and loopers and things like that and i think that those computer programs like pure data and max msp let students just explore and and build whatever suits their personal projects and their personal needs what are some of those projects we've had a couple of students record full-length albums of original music as part of their senior capstone project in the music major we've had a course on sound design in which students you know they they took a scene from a movie took all the sound out of it and then they had to replace it they had to re-record everything including dialogue sound effects ambient sounds music you know even even people who don't think of themselves as musicians had to use this technology to create soundtracks and they did a great job what are some of the reasons students interested in music choose to come to sweetbriar i think that like any other field they know that they're going to have an opportunity to work closely with their professors and i think what makes this program distinctive is the opportunity to work in music production and audio production in a really you know professional level setting from day one in fact you don't even have to be a music major to take some of these classes in the studio sweetbar has an accredited engineering program and i ask if the new music technology has caught the attention of the engineering students yet in fact one aspect of daisy's harp is technology daisy's harp is the student music ensemble and josh talks more about it later but not just technology we buy i want to build technology so the first thing we did is we built a laser harp well it's a it's not a laser hard yet because there's no lasers in it but it's a light sensitive harp right now it's a prototype and we keep kind of adding to it and adding features and stuff but i had a prototype using a an arduino unit and a breadboard a breadboard is a platform for creating circuit designs to test i had a violinist in daisy's harp who was an engineering major and she said you know i can i can install this in a case so that it's more presentable because it was just a bunch of wires sticking out of a piece of plastic and she put it in a black box and she um i think she actually soldered a circuit board so that all the connections are more secure now it looks much prettier so it's great to have the engineering students around at the end of our conversation josh shows me the sarpa studio it's on the lower level in babcock next to the practice rooms the studio used to be the music library but now its shelves are filled with tech related gadgets there is a pegboard on one wall that holds rows and rows of wound up cords and against another wall is a table with two computer monitors a keyboard and a small rack holding recording equipment here's the light heart the black case is about the size of a large tissue box and josh pulls up some electricians tape holding the bottom in place so i can look inside the breadboard is actually attached to the top of the case where there's a web of colored wires there's also a hole on the side of the case where a usb cord slides in to attach to the breadboard um so actually this this patch is actually for this it's called a leap motion controller and this is designed for um virtual reality so it can track your fingers in in real time so let me see if i can get some sound out of this give me a second output device [Music] scarlett [Music] tell me what you're doing well so i'm just moving my hand up and down above this leap motion controller and as i get lower the pitch gets lower and then as i get higher on the computer screen in front of josh is a grid with red dots these dots represent josh's fingers hovering over the leap motion sensor as josh moves his fingers the dots raise or lower along with the sound created now more about daisy's harp the student music ensemble so daisy's harp is an idea that i had a few years ago i was just thinking how do we how do we provide the best musical ensemble experience for students because the traditional ensembles choir band orchestra um we're not able to support those in the traditional way but but also getting together and performing with other musicians is really critical to music education and to developing as a musician and as a composer i had an opportunity in grad school to work with a new music ensemble at the university of north texas and conduct several pieces over about a year and what's interesting about that group is it was different every semester and so you might have a trumpet and a flu one semester and then all strings the next and so using that model i thought that's a lot like what's happening here at sweeper i can never really count on the same group of instruments from semester to semester so i thought well what we'll do is we'll start the semester we'll see what we've got and then with the students because i want them to take leadership role we'll figure out what we're going to do this semester then the students create the program they pick the music and arrange it figuring out who's going to play what instruments they also create the event flyers and the performance programs so it's it's a very holistic sort of musical experience and i think it's actually more relevant because as a professional musician this is closer to what i'm doing on a regular basis you know i never have the luxury of just sitting down and playing the music in front of me so so i think the students have really latched on to that idea daisy's harp was named for daisy williams the only child of sweet sweetbriar's founder she died at age 16 and the college was founded in her memory because i knew that this this ensemble was going to be a break in a lot of ways from the tradition of music as sweet briar which has been primarily piano and voice and i knew that we were going to be going in a in a more futuristic direction uh maybe a little more avant-garde but i wanted to be grounded in the tradition of sweep briar and i know that daisy played the harp and that her harp is on display in the sweeper air museum but as we're looking forward and being as innovative and cutting edge as we can be with music and sound we're also in touch with our our heritage too i know you had asked me before for some recording so you can get an idea of what we sound like and the truth is we sound different all the time it just depends on what we're doing um what trying to remember what do we do last semester oh games so we did music from video games we had we had people come in and play video games with the sound off and then we provided all the music and sound effects technology is also a big part of this because you know since i got here i've it's been important to me to to infuse technology more and more into the music program i think it's um not only is it extremely relevant and helpful for students to have some facility with technology but also it's really it's an economical use of resources because anyone can learn to be a composer with a computer even if they don't play an instrument take billy eilish you know she just won the big four grammy awards on her laptop in her bedroom it's different you know it's not beethoven or brahms but i think it's totally valid and it's um it's the sort of thing that anyone from any background can learn how to do while i was at the library the week before my research took a serendipitous spin i gather ambient audio recordings for the stories i produced so i recorded myself walking up and down the spiral staircase because as a student i heard the echoes of my footsteps on those marble stairs almost every day anyway the library's circulation supervisor had seen me and ended up telling me that her husband gathers audio with his students i take a quick glance at her name tag megan harris yep josh harris is her husband i asked and even before arriving at sweetbar i wanted to speak with josh but right then it became a must so i added another topic to bring up with him collecting recordings with his students first we'll take sound walks we just walk around in silence and sort of keeping note of every sound we hear whether it be you know a building's hvac system uh the wind and the trees the footsteps crunching in the leaves you know all of these details that we usually tune out it's really important for music students to be attuned to all the sounds so i'm really strongly influenced by john cage who believe that all sounds could be music if you listen to it as though it were music john cage was an american composer music theorist artist and a philosopher he also contributed to the development of modern dance it's almost like the listener projects music back onto the sounds i really like that idea but it also as a composer helps you be more in tune with sound in general so i like to have students collect field recordings and they've collected the bells ringing on the hour [Music] we even go in the chapel sometimes and record the organ and there's a great little mechanical organ up in the front of the chapel and what's great about that is that there's a it's got an air compressor in it and so when you flip the switch it takes a second to build up the pressure to play but if you're holding down the keys when you turn on the organ it'll it sounds really uh out of tune because there's no pressure and as the pressure builds up it comes into tune it kind of sounds like the beginning of the movie where they have the thx logo and then again when you turn off the switch that's something that they always enjoy recording and then you know i have them put it through a series of processes just do a variety of things to the sound to see what they can come up with you know i think that some people listen to it and probably wouldn't describe it as music but that's okay we know whether you want to call it sound art or music it doesn't i don't care it's it's all the same in my mind josh's wife also mentioned that the family was planning a summer trip to europe and that josh would be working on a project so i asked him about that too and just to let you know they've postponed this trip to next summer i'll give you some background last year i was in south korea for the international computer music conference they were playing my piece i can't recall without a tiny fleck of blue crying light into the void that's the name of it anyway so i was there i spent a few days before the conference touring some islands off the coast i took my zoom recorder and i just recorded everything you know so i have sounds from people playing on the beach i have city sounds of soul so the idea is i'm going to make an album of ambient music using those recordings well we are going to uh europe this summer going with my family it kind of started as a trip for my daughter who's a senior in high school and i thought well you know i'll take my recorder and i'll do the same thing there and so that's the next project but i like the idea of getting these sounds that are symbolic that mean something to me and then seeing where they go i am planning to scout locations and then in the coming years i am interested in doing a three-week travel course to vienna and to paris this would be a course taught during the capstone session of sweet bars curriculum i end up mentioning my audio production path through the center for documentary studies at duke in durham north carolina and our conversation morphs we've got some students here on campus right now i can think of three or four who are really interested in going into film and um some are thinking about going to film school after sweet briar summer thinking about just going and you know starting as a pa and working their way up so i'm offering a class this semester called sound on screen mostly we're studying how composers and sound designers and directors and cinematographers all work together to create something that's sort of greater than the sum of those parts a friend of mine is a filmmaker he's a writer and director he asked me to do some music for his film and i just really fell in love with it it's i think i don't know i think most people sort of grow up with a mythical understanding of movies and then when you see how they're made you either get turned off or you get more excited by it and i got more excited so i just finished the second film for my friend henry johnston and that one hopefully will come out later in the spring it's called hum but one thing i did when i started getting into film was i started looking at movies especially recent movies that were doing really interesting things they're blurring the lines between music and sound design remember when i arrived for the interview josh had just returned from sundance with the sound on screen class and he and a student were going over receipts so while we were there these students they were really going out of their way to attend panel discussions and meet filmmakers and they were talking to everyone in lines of movies they were talking to people on the buses they were networking it was really impressive how excited they were and how how much they were you know taking from the experience but i was just meeting with a student who is now in email contact with the sound designer for a film that we saw called scare me and so this student you know is really excited about that and she's going to report back to the class and that student this is brianna ray my name is b short for brianna b ray i am a junior at sweet bar college i am a performing arts major but i like to say music major brianna and i had planned to meet up on my next trip to campus which would have been in march but since that trip was cancelled we talked via skype so please pardon the sound quality i've since improved my recording method i'm very interested in foley work holy work is a type of craftsmanship that's behind the screens in terms of audio so if you hear a gun cocking what you're hearing is most likely celery breaking it's making sounds to emphasize what you are seeing and not to mention that like sure you go to school for sound design but you can't go to school for fully work yeah fully work is an apprenticeship it's a skill that one would develop with practice over time i actually created that gun cocking sound by breaking some celery just like bee said it took six stocks and about ten minutes to get that itsy bitsy sound and i know it's not that great there's a lot of philosophy that goes behind what is heard and with the experience of sundance we have a better understanding of what to listen for in terms of why the director chose this pathway in terms of like i'm going to do this minimalism music or i'm just going to do no music whatsoever because it has a bigger impact josh mentioned the film scare me which is directed by josh rubin so the story premises that by chance two writers of horror novels rent cabins near each other as getaways to write and by chance they meet for the first time while on a run b picks up the story later that day and while she shares the details you'll hear some more of my homemade sounds and some stock audio clips too the audio helps suggest some mental images and add some ambiance there were a lot of like traditional horror film beginnings so um the main character who was played by josh rubin there are times where he like he thinks he hears something in the basement so like we're all thinking no don't go in the basement don't you dare go in the basement he opens the door we're like no and even he's like nope and he just shuts the door so therefore it's cutting off that horror film initiative um as the plot moves along it's dark and stormy the light's cut out and he's like no oh god and then um aya cash who plays this very successful author so she comes knocking on the door josh opens and um she's like my electricity also burnt out so i'm going to chill here and he's like okay cool they tell each other scary stories and i think several of us want to see it thinking whenever they start to tell a story you know we will see on screen a dramatization of the story like they'll cut to the story that they're talking about that didn't happen the camera was always on these two writers just talking to each other in the house but all the sound design was from the stories that they were telling so they didn't give us the visuals like we expected but they were able to communicate all that through sound design so there was one about a werewolf he started lurking up the up the stairs he's lumbering up yeah he starts lumbering up the stairs like show me that lumber breathe like a werewolf breathe but it's not a werewolf at all it's just a vivid imagination on the screen and with that comes a lot of sound design so you really do hear like the scratching on the door or you really do hear the squeaky wheels of the oxygen tank and it's giving this build up and suspense of like gosh this is actually going to scare me um i had a project to do on a modern sound designer doing contemporary movies so after i saw this film i'm thinking oh my gosh i thoroughly enjoyed this film i love the sound design behind it i wonder who the sound designer was and so i looked him up his name is john morrows so i emailed john and he's like oh that's really cool yeah sure here's my number uh call me i was like awesome and so then i called him and we talked sound design and scare me and fully work for about two hours [Music] although i was home from sundance at that point i felt like i was still in that sundance feel still in that sundance moment because i'm talking to a professional sound designer [Applause] [Music] what other noteworthy experiences did you have while you were at sundance i kept a journal so i wrote down my thoughts and feelings on a bunch of different movies that i saw [Music] so the sundance trip was a huge hit and really made a big impact on b b also mentions that the sundance trip was an extra fifteen hundred dollars and she was able to go because of the gel grant she applied for and received through sweetbriar [Music] what was your path to sweetwire how how long have you been here this is my sixth year here i came in 2014 i was doing my graduate work at the university of north texas i finished my phd in 2013 and it was around then that got a call from an old friend who was a professor here at sweetbriar and we had been friends as undergrads at appalachian state you know he called me kind of out of the blue he just said where are you in your degree and i said well i'm finishing up you know and he says well my colleague is retiring and there might be an opportunity for us to hire a composer so i was excited i was able to come and visit campus and just fell in love it was beautiful and i thought i'd really love to end up here and i was extremely fortunate that the timing just worked out perfectly so i was able to get hired this is another excerpt from hum the film josh gourd it's fantastic how josh has introduced technology and sound design into sweetbar's music program it really opens up the career possibilities for students to explore and gives everyone the chance to just have fun experimenting with audio i'd like to thank a few people for allowing me to use their audio clips thanks to director henry johnston and composer joshua harris of hum thanks also to director josh rubin and sound designer john morrows of scare me and another thanks to josh harris for clips from his south korea and sweet bar sound collections and one more thanks to student tiffany han she allowed me to record her playing outside her practice room come back next month for more sweet stories in the dell take care [Music] you