FUN_RANDOM_SOUNDS - 2007

Video loop of just over 3 minutes. View video here:

This project is a response to my skeptical view of marketing language, particularly those marketers who appeal to the almost universal need to be creative by naming a software tool
XYZ Creative.

The impetus: a group of free sound effects in Microsoft’s Creative Fun Pack was titled ‘fun_random_sounds’. However, when listening to the sounds, I realized that the sounds were neither ‘fun’ nor particularly ‘random’. For example, the sound of a door closing defies categorization as either fun or random. This is a situation where the marketing manager is using overstated and overblown language in an attempt to make the product more exciting than it is.

So I decided to create a project that would make use of these sound effects in a fun and random manner. Participants were filmed listening to the sound effects and then defining each sound effect in a binary manner. The sound would be described as either fun or random.

April 2007