Webspinna Battle

To represent a theme, a character, an idea, or a setting sonically, is the work of many talented people in the media industry. Whether it’s mixing songs for a radio show, a DJ mixing sounds for a live performance, or a sound mixer creating a soundscape for a film, each delivery of music, spoken word, and sound effect communicates an idea, sometimes so iconically that image provokes an accompanying sound. In our piece, “The American Dream Webspinna Battle,” we explore the iconic places of America, and the sounds associated with those places through the minds of an optimistic, patriotic believer and a cynical, doubting American-mythbuster.

In Lethem’s “The Ecstasy of Influence,” he attributes the success of Jazz and Blues music to an open source culture, where the music in this landscape is reworked by musicians and other musicians. In our conception of our work, we referred only to existing sounds and music to portray our idea, using the recognizability and cultural cultural context of a sound in order to shape a bigger theme. Our theme was the myth and perception of the American Dream represented by three iconic American places: Disneyland, Hollywood, and New York City. Each place is introduced with a song that is considered a possible theme for that place. (Main Street Music from Disneyland, Party in the USA for LA, and Empire State of Mind for NYC). We tried to sonically portray each place as a idealistic glimmer with upbeat music and pleasant soundbites, then broke it down with its darker counterparts. A child screaming and screeching cha ching allude to the capitalist and miserable side effects of Disneyland, horror music from the very films to come out of Hollywood refers to the darker contributions of the film world to society, and police sirens and gunshots refer to the anxiety and fear associated with crime in urban America. However, with our final sound clip, we push aside the over-glorified and over-demonized aspects of a specific cultural context, and replace it with sounds that represent a universal connection that attributes to a true ideal.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was a pretty big inspiration of the idea’s we were trying to present. The Great Gatsby is a good illustration of the expectations vs. reality of United States society. We often think our concepts of what America should be like will be what it is like in actuality. We are devastated when we find out we worked so hard only to accomplish very little. Though it seems like a little at first, we come to find out that it is sufficient. Success in careers, families, and other aspects of marriage are little bits of the American dream that are attainable. This relates heavily to the ideas Fitzgerald was trying to present.