Sence of Space - Piece One

Piece one - Meat Factory Ear worms
By - Richine Beirne
Year - 2008
Length - 13mins 47 seconds

In this piece I immediately noticed that there were at least 3 or 4 different layers which make up this sound scape. These being, the knifes scraping against each other/factory sounds, the mans voice over and various pieces of music to explain how he feels about working here sometimes and how the music get him through it.

The different sounds that are being heard throughout this piece help create a sense of space due to the specific ear worms he uses which remind him of certain things. An ear worm is a song that gets stuck in to your head and reminds you of a certain place/thing and in this case he used to sing "Bright eyes" to take his mind away from cutting up the meat. This really helped me to create an image in my head as to what it would have been like for this man to be cutting up the dead animals and to be covered in their blood.

The voice over itself is a middle aged man with a very smooth middle pitched tone to his voice and has a very strong Northern Ireland accent which is rather soothing to and so juxtaposed the topics he was speaking about throughout the piece as these wern't so "smooth" minded.

Although I did like the concept to this piece, I found it quite unsettling to listen to. The way the ear worms are cut in to this piece of sound is very abrupt as I just begin to get into a piece of music and then it stops, with the sound effect of one of the knifes he is using and to me it represented him cutting into one of the animals, so the music had too be cut too.