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The Sensational Museum
Sophie's Sound of 'Comfort'
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Have you tried to describe a sound that makes you feel a certain way?Rather than relying on the sound to do the heavy lifting, Sophie created an exercise where you instead provide a broader contextual scape of not only the sound, but how it changes the space, and how you feel (both inside and outside) about it.Check out the full descriptive transcript below, and why not try out this exercise for yourself?A descriptive transcript of a voice-note by Sophie Vohra, describing her sound of ‘comfort’… a boiling kettleSpeaker’s vocal description
Sophie speaks in a clear and considered way, with a lyrical, soft and lower vocal tone… and occasionally some loud laughs! Putting on her more ‘formal voice’, here she speaks with a ‘non-typical’ north-western accent (aka suspend your disbelief that everyone there sounds like they are from Liverpool, Manchester or Bury), with dropped ‘a’s and stronger enunciation. She often wonders if her different code-switching voices that make up critical parts of her identity (day-to-day, Macclesfield, Yorkshire, academic/telephone, British Indian, Spanish) come through.
TranscriptAt the end of a long day, you go to your parents’ house, come through the door, and your mum has put the kettle on for you to make a cup of tea, or a nice hot drink. And you can feel the vibrations of the countertop as the kettle starts to boil up, pushing the heat through, as it tries to get the water to the temperature, and there's a deep hum, and with the hum there's the vibration, as it does its work. And as it's reaching its peak to get it to that heat, the vibrations get more pronounced.
The sound is taking over the space encompassing the space more than it had before. Until eventually you start to hear the sound of bubbles forming but also, the feeling of that as the vibrations of the kettle itself is interrupted with the bubbles that are forming as it gets to the heat. And the space then fills up with a warm as the steam comes out.
And all of this deep hum, this voluminous sound, is then interrupted so quickly by the clicking of the switch. Which then leads to the quick dissipation of the sound of the vibration of everything, until there's just a very slight hiss coming out. And the vibration is only really felt through the kettle now.
And that moment of waiting until you think it won't scorch your tea bag, or whether that even matters at that point. And the warmth that then comes off it as you pour it into your teacup, the warmth that you feel from the care that you've been given and shown, and the warmth that you will then get as you drink the cup of tea, as you take your big, long sips, or even just holding it there in front of your face for a little while, waiting for the temperature to go down.
But all of that comes from the sound, and the actions of that kettle.
Now arguably it doesn't really matter what that kettle is, what type, who made it. What matters more is what it provides to the context of you feeling comfort.
Alt text: [On a solid peach-coloured background is The Sensational Museum ear icon, in navy blue, to indicate this is an audio output logo. Below the ear reads "Sound of 'Comfort'", in navy blue, to indicate the name of the episode.]
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