Maman is a large spider sculpture that is supposed to be representative of the sculptor's mother, who was a weaver. The large metal sculpture with small eggs inside the main compartment is based on that of a connection, a deep sentimentality and ultimately a sense of solace in the abstract. I absolutely fucking hate spiders so to say my first reaction was that of distaste and a slight amount of fear is no exaggeration. However to me from this picture what I began to see was not simply a large spider, but a collective connection between people, like thoughts bubbling into a cloud of data, yet that spider was there, it bridged the connections between people and yet it was scary to me, and no one seemed to be noticing in the picture; personally I wanted my sound project to reflect that feeling.
The first inspiration for the spider itself it reminded me of an image from a personal favourite manga/anime series "aku no hana", in particular the flower of evil that appears at the end of the first episode has a distinctive crackling sound, it's distorted, has an odd bass backing, and it's almost static-like input both gives the feeling of this electronic frontier and an added sense of fear from myself, however that fear most likely stems from my association of radio interference with monsters in the "silent Hill" series of video games!
For the rest of the sound I took some standard recordings in similar environments to the picture for backing, and used several royalty-free ringtones and crowd and recorded conversation noises from a sound studio recording and started to distort them, each with reverberation to reflect the large open space, but also with slow build-ups, reversed sounds of the people, and increasing volumes to gain this sense of overwhelming the listener. This was based partially on extracts from Einstein on the Beach by Philip Glass in terms of it's method of starting comprehensible and building up to the point of pure incomprehensible babble. It was from that sense of overwhelming that I attempted to make the sound feel almost fearful before cutting out to show no one noticing it at all.
I feel what I should criticise in this piece is perhaps in the sense of pacing and that the end doesn't overwhelm as much as it perhaps is aiming to do, perhaps by adding more people and extra more digital effects such as white noise I could have furthered that sense to its logical conclusion, however the one minute restriction does lead to a sense of wanting a longer build up, that and the crowd sounds are arguably a bit quiet and that i potentially overstepped the dynamic range of common audio equipment; however personally I'm rather happy with it, I set out to make a less literal and more abstract interpretation of the picture, and I'd like to think I have completed that goal!
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