Describe Yourself is a 6 minute piece that was commissioned by violinist Christopher Whitley.
At the time, I was preoccupied with the idea of self-audio describing over Zoom. What I delivered to Chris in the end was a piece for violin, voice and Zoom.
Chris graciously went through several rounds of workshopping with me over Zoom. This video is documentation of our final session and might be considered the piece’s premiere performance.
This piece and recording was released as the title track on RedShift Records in 2023.
The following are the performance notes for Describe Yourself:
Score excerpt of Describe Yourself
This piece is based on the practice of self-audio description.
Audio description is a spoken commentary of the visual information needed to understand the content of a performance, film or gallery exhibit. It enables a blind or visually impaired person to experience and enjoy a performance on an equal basis as a sighted person by providing information that is not made clear by dialogue or sound.
Self-audio description is when a person describes themselves for the benefit of a blind or visually impaired person, again, to provide information a sighted person would have.
Zoom is a video communication platform that became widely used in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It is an example of the current self-video design of video communication platforms, a design to supposedly help remind us of (our) presence in the call. In addition to this design feature and its intention, I was interested in how you could control everyone seeing or hearing you by turning your camera or microphone on or off.
Over the pandemic, I was asked to self-audio describe over Zoom and found myself resistant to stating my ethnicity. The process of creation was an exploration of that resistance.
The performance is meant to occur over Zoom. The sounds played by the violin were developed to interact specifically with Zoom and incorporate the sound processing of the platform that prioritizes the voice over “background noise”. The violinist and the vocalist are instructed when to use the option to turn their video on and off.
The voice was originally conceived for myself, the “composer”. For future performances, the voice should be performed by someone “not normally seen”.