Moving on from these discussions into my artworks, I began to consider my lack of attention paid towards my soundscape.
During some of the lectures, I discovered a student whose work focuses on soundscape, particularly its relation to the pandemic. She reached out to me via e-mail expressing her interest in collaborating or helping with my project. After explaining my research interests, she mentioned that she knew a psychiatrist who worked at Aintree Hospital who could record sounds for me.
'Aintree Hospital' taken from Wikipedia
I initially became quite excited by this, as the raw footage would be really interesting to manipulate and work with. Upon considering this further, I began to stumble across the issue of ethics. As the sounds were coming from a clinical setting, there are some considerations needed, as I would need permission to allow the recording of these sounds for the purpose of my exhibition. The sounds could also capture personal conversations of doctors and patients; thus, breaching the doctor, patient confidentiality.
After arranging a meeting with Mark Roughley, we came to the conclusion to use free sample sounds of hospital equipment and environments, due to the ethical issues and the long process it would take.
This led me back to square one, however, I found it was also a beneficial teaching point on how some collaborations don’t always go to plan and work out. Just because we won’t collaborate for this project, doesn’t mean that we can’t collaborate on future projects.
After looking into the avenue of soundscapes, I moved on and began to construct my reflective report. As I made a work diary that detailed my progress day by day, I found this extremely useful in planning my reflective. I was able to pick up points from my work diary and evaluate various outcomes. I particularly found it useful to have a template on how to construct the reflective report that John provided, and it encouraged me to be concise in my writing.