CRV: Process Piece: Cooking

(with Mitchell Dunn)

As we got together to work on this process piece, we both became increasingly aware of the sounds made by simple processes.  In fact, many of the sounds became more interesting to listen to when isolated from their visual context.  The process of cooking is filled with a wide variety of sounds, and as most of those are rather easily identifiable and interesting, it made sense for us to choose this to document.  

Hearing the audio of various processes without actually seeing them happening is rather common in films but more obviously in podcasts.  A completely fictional podcast entitled “Hello From The Magic Tavern” has background processes going on throughout each piece.  These are composed mainly of unnamed people conversing, eating and drinking, but they are drowned out by the main characters in the podcast.  At least once in every episode, there is a track of a confused Burger King employee working at the drive-through and trying to figure out what the strange interference is which he is getting on his headset.  Another piece (this one a lot more serious) has people telling their stories as a foghorn sounds several times as a symbol (https://beta.prx.org/stories/118343).

But using more basic sounds with little to no vocals is quite a bit different.  The sounds can become ambiguous sometimes and can be mixed in new and creative ways to describe entirely different processes. Originally, an entire elaborate dinner was planned to be recorded and cut down, but after listening to all the sound recorded by both of us, we decided to use the sounds we had in common to simplify the process to harvesting, preparing, and cooking potatoes. The beginning captures the actual digging up of potatoes from the earth. The potatoes are then ran under water and chopped up before being boiled. Finally, the dinner table is set and the food is served, and at the end, the leftovers are wrapped and stored.

The dinner preparation was simple enough to record on a smartphone, with each individual sound effect divided into separate files. After transferring them to a computer, they were imported into a film-editing program and trimmed down to 1 ½ minutes. Each segment was only given up to ten seconds before transitioning to the next - it doesn’t take much to recognize or guess what it is. The whole piece together gives off the sound of food going through it’s natural course, from the earth to the plate.