For our process piece, we chose to record ourselves making what Josh refers to as a “Ramwich”— a beast of a sandwich made of Ramen noodles, eggs, lunch meat, refried beans, barbecue sauce, and mayonnaise (all on toast). The recording process went remarkably well. There were no hiccups, and we even found some sounds in our audio that we didn’t even realize happened.
Once we compiled all the sound, we realized that a traditional “This American Life”-like audio documentary wouldn’t cut it. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but we thought we could take it a step further. We decided we’d do this by turning our sounds into a song, a symphony of sandwich making (if you will).
Like the actual recording process, our editing went really smoothly and our sound bites meshed together in a way we couldn’t have expected going in. This process was a testament to the idea that sound is a dynamic thing that, even when the seemingly-banal sounds of a sandwich being made, can create something bizarrely beautiful. Looking back, our inspiration was the clip from Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman, and our piece really is a manifestation of many of that scene’s ideas about the importance of sound.
This all builds towards the idea that as much as making a sandwich is a process with many steps, the composition and creation of a song is a process in itself. We ended up discovering the nuances and surprises in both of these processes, which sort of make this assignment doubly exciting.
Even though our piece does not follow a documentary style, or even a linear structure, it takes sound and puts it into a context that, at least we think, visualizes a time and place in a pretty wonderful way. This is all neglecting the obvious, though—we got to make delicious sandwiches.
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