Morning

Artist

Dod Procter was an English artist in the 20th century. She and her husband, Ernst Procter, both studied in Paris at Atelier Colarossi. They were both influenced by Impressionism and Post-Impressionism and the artists that they met in France, such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Paul Cezanne. Procter dealt a lot with realism, as she painted a lot of women in a way that's very true to appearances. In a lot of Procter's portraits of women, the subjects fill up majority of the space on the canvas. 

Work

The subject of portrait was a fisherman's daughter that Procter personally knew. Procter paid close attention to the light and shadows in this painting, which made it look realistic. The coolness of color tone also contributes to the sense of stillness this painting conveys. This particular work, Morning, was displayed in New York, followed by a tour in Britain, from 1927 to 1929, due to its high popularity. This painting caught my eye as I was browsing through Procter's works because the still state the woman in the painting was in was captured very realistically by Procter, and it appealed to me. 

Approach

I felt very peaceful looking at the woman sleeping in the painting. The context being that the woman is a fisherman's daughter, I imagine that her room is right by the beach. Therefore, I thought of capturing the tranquility conveyed by this painting by designing sound one would probably hear had he/she been standing in the room with the woman sleeping there. 

I recorded the sound of deep breaths, noise outside my room early in the morning, and sound of me blowing into the microphone (to create the effect of wind blowing), to try to create the white noise. I also used a snatch of the song Summer Wine by Lana Del Rey, and woman's laughters, in the final mix, to emulate distant noises of women singing and laughing on the beach. I chose brown noise as my background noise because 

Product

I created a WAV file, with Audacity, of a mix of different sounds I recorded and generated by Audacity. This piece of audio has 8 components to it: breathing, wind effect, breeze effect, water effect brown noise background, birds/grasshopper sound, wah wah wind effect, woman singing, and woman laughing. The breathing channel is created by me breathing into a microphone; wind effect by blowing into a microphone,  pass low-pass filter on it, adding fade in/fade out effects; breeze effect by recording noise outside my room and adding phaser effect; water effect by generate brown noise on Audacity; birds/grasshopper sound by recording bird/grasshopper sound near a tree; wah wah wind effect by taking the recording I used for the breeze effect and adding wah wah effect; woman singing by recording part of Lana Del Rey's Summer Wine; woman laughing by recording my laughters. 

Then, I edited the sounds by delaying, compressing, stretching, repeating, layering, and clipping them, to best convey my emotions when I was looking at the painting. Of all the sounds, breathing, breeze, and bird/grasshopper sounds are the most prevalent. 

Reflection

Morning by Procter was a realistic painting, and I think I captured this theme by recording sounds in real life in my best ability, and the final product sounds close to white noise, which is realistic. Also, I tried to convey the stillness in the painting by having most of the audio be a monotone of breathing, breeze, and bird/insects sounds. 

Since I'm new to Audacity, I definitely familiarized myself with some of the tricks and functionalities of Audacity. Since the time frame was small, I think my project could be more sophisticated and polished had there been more time to work on it. I would probably actually record sounds of ocean waves and incorporate it into my work.