THE SOUND STORY

“The Sound Story”—the first minor performance of the subject EDU3022 (Theater in TESL). At that point in time, it was the first class of the subject Theater in TESL. I was quite excited in the first class, expecting doing things that is a little bit extraordinary rather than merely listen to the lecture.

The task on sound story was emphasizing on how sound can be manipulated that ultimately we can see there was a storyline out of the sound that we had made. Puan Ju had already reminded us not to use ordinary sound of ambulance, farting sound and few other disgusting sounds. I was quite excited to do this since it was the first performance.

We were given about 20 minutes to discuss on our storyline and the sounds, thus got prepared with our own sound story. To actually “inventing” the sounds, we chose to go out of ‘bilik tayangan’ and find our own space and discussed about the task. Honestly, it was quite a tedious task for us because we were lacking of ideas. Sounds? We only had limited sounds in minds. Basically, in the early part of our discussion, the most common sounds that we can think of were the sound of car, cat and baby. Anyhow, when the stress was rising as we only have a few minutes, we chose quite a lame storyline. Yes, it was an ad hoc plan. So we only practice twice in terms of producing the sounds and the turn of which sounds came first and which sounds came after.

Our sound story started with a sound of car where a man drove it. Later, the car stopped and there was the sound of the tickling of keys while the man whistles as he went in his house. As he entered his house, there was the sound of the howling wolf. The man then yawned and stroked himself on bed, and later he slept indicated by the sound of snoring. Later, there were sounds of baby crying, cat screeching and ghost-like whispers came after one another. Then the lightning struck that the loud sound had awaken the man. Suddenly, the man shocked and fainted. At the end, our sound story ends with sounds of few people laughing that depicted somebody few people had playing prank on the man.

Without anyone aware, we were actually late for 5 minutes. So, we became the last group to perform. We quite nervous to see other groups performed better and come out with interesting sounds that did not appear in our mind.

After the ninth group had performed, now it’s our turn. Our heart was pounding with beats, uncertain beats. However, we managed to start in controlled manner. Anyhow, there were some miscommunications in the middle of our performance. One of our members forgot her turn and it turned to be a quite a long pause during the performance. Thing was getting flawed as we took a rather long silence to get ready with the lightning sound. Anyhow, we managed to perform the laughing so sound fairly well.

But, once people opened their eyes, we heard some frustrating and unappealing mumbles. “Too long…”, “I don’t get it”, “It’s very hard”; these were the comments from our friends. It took about quite a while to actually have someone to guess on our performance. At last, Nalini did give correct guess.