Learning Journey

Attending the London College of Communication over the last four years has cultivated my craft in ways I did not expect. Starting the sound arts & music course, I don’t think I had a very good idea of what I wanted out of it. For the first two years, I was confused as to what I was going to do with all of this new information pertaining to sound arts; my portfolio and practice at this point were faint and scattered. I spent most of the time on assigned briefs weighing into the research rather than the practice itself, which at the time was frustrating and I felt like I was going nowhere with what I had developed. Now I can say my practice has honed into something personal and intellectual that has been aided by academia. Of course, I have my qualms with the organization and execution of my education throughout the years, but it would be disrespectful of me to say I came out of this course with nothing. Accumulating work for my portfolio over the last three years, I have come to realize I am not exactly honed into the areas of sound art that I wish to be in, yet. During first year when the pandemic was in full swing, my feelings of confusion in this course were only amplified. Finding my path within this practice after this period of time required lots of work; I was saying yes to any project that came down my path. This reaction definitely came from a place of wanting to make up for lost time, so I look back on my portfolio now and see lots of projects I probably would not volunteer to be a part of now. A major issue I had with this course was how little the students got to share or display their work. I can count on my hands the number of critiques we had in the span of three years, which I never understood. From this, I felt like I was not aided to leave my comfort zone within this course. In the beginning, for each brief, I felt like I had to somewhat mimic what the lecturers wanted to see in my own vision, rather than try to synthesize something of my own mind. I felt like this was because it took a long time to really understand different perspectives of what these creative sound works could entail. Lots of the modules offered within our course sounded lovely and beneficial for my practice (and some of them were), but I think due to exterior circumstances, most of them they fell short in helping me create something I feel proud of and wish to pursue further. I think year two was the real turning point for me; where I felt like my research and what I wanted to do with my practice began to take form. After this point I began to research things that I wanted to focus on, and I spent lots of my time doing this at this point. The moment where I began to question my own practice was when I began to understand deconstruction within sound arts; both in theory and in practice. This theme of deconstruction gave me the perspective to question the foundations of any pre-existing practice and how I could take things apart and put them back together within my own vision; again, both theoretically and in experimentation. With this; I learned how being neurodiverse has informed my formation an artist. Researching heavily into this, I became very interested in how sound as both a physical force and an aural exchange of information filters differently for someone who deviates from a neurotypical bracket. This realization informed me in my own sonic practice, enabling me to explore and experiment further while being able to intellectualize this experimentation and abstraction. Now I am moving my practice further outside of my comfort zone and taking this gathered research to accumulate new work.