the time of sound

Personal Time

This is a really conceptual interpretation of time, I would say, and less of a timekeeping clock than a personal experience.
Clicking opens and closes a clock display, animations happen on their own when the times come. The background color changes in accordance to the time of day.
→ link to code

Design Process

When I made this, I had just moved back to Atlanta from New Brunswick, and we lived next to the train tracks in New Brunswick. Earlier that year, for about a week (in Jersey), I recorded the times for every instance that I heard the train go by, as well as the times for when I heard geese outside. These two sounds were the predominant disruptive background noises that I heard, just living my life, and kind of served as an indication of time that I was experiencing.

I attempted to construct a clock/system with these timestamps I had, playing an animation at certain times in each day of the week. It kind of turned out to be a version of my experience that can be distributed and experienced in the same way by others because of the lack of timezone restrictions.

Timestamps:

I animated the train to chug along a couple times, and the goose to just run across the canvas once. The animations start once the minute starts, and stops when the minute ends, so I had to fidget with the timing of the train for it to go off screen completely when the minute ends. I had wanted to animate the goose actually running, but I didn't have the time and brain power to spare, unfortunately.
I used 24 hour time because it was easiest and that's what I prefer and use anyways.

Reflection

I had these timestamps from my Time class in first year, second semester. I never ended up using them so I'd been holding on to them for some potential future project, so it was nice to finally do something with them.

I put way too much time into making the goose, for it to rarely appear on screen, but I think it kind of reflects the actual experience in a way; I heard the train so often that I'd become desensitized and tired of it, while the goose calls were a little bit more fun to hear, but still bothersome nonetheless.

Just the timestamps by themselves as well, also indicate my experience of time by directly showing at which hours I was awake to hear and record these sounds.