Haldane Building, 9 students

Congratulations to the Class of 2023, graduating from BDes Sound for Moving Image, where students have used state of the art technologies to express each of their own creative voices. They share their unique perspectives on themes around sustainability, gender, creating magical fantasy soundscapes, speculations on maritime mythology, and witty audiobooks to encourage literacy in early years. These range from the complex technological workflows of Alex Bell’s dystopian imagining of a 22nd century world thrown into climate change (rendered in spatial audio and featuring A.I. generated paintings and voices), to a lo-fi camcorder capturing of Michiel’s immersion into peat bogs and stop motion animation of a sea-weed monster. Throughout the showcase, the students are telling their stories, inviting you into a sublime other world.

The diversity of the work is testament to the students’ close knit community, where they have supported eachothers ideas as they delved into intensive self-directed dissertations – for example, a student conducted user testing to engineer an altered state of consciousness in participants using Deep Listening methods and Light and Space animations; another investigated the materiality of sound, to discover how sound can be sculpted through bespoke glass cavities.

There are times where students showcase their eclectic humour, in a painstaking, surreal animation showing the great escape of members of a cheese-cult, and others where they show a deeply sensitive reverence for the experiences of war veterans, and even venturing beyond the human-centric to imagine the sounds that a water molecule would hear. Eve allows us to hear the “voice” of plants in a community garden, as she constructs a bio-sonification of 88 languages spoken in Govanhill. Throughout this Graduate Showcase, see how students from the BDes Sound for Moving Image use professional industry standards build worlds of sound appropriate for art galleries, experimental music performances, site specific audio tours, introspective soundscapes, and in doing so answer deeply philosophical questions. Congratulations!

Dr. Jessica Argo, Programme Leader