You and Your Dirty Lousy Martini

Spectrogram Martini:   Cocktail garnishes acoustic inspection.

Media Study ROYAL COLLEGE OF ART | SOUND STUDY 2021

Phoebe (Yichi) Cheng

The spectrogram is a virtual food and fruit retail company devoted to proximate supply chain commodity processes for city customers. The company’s foundation is the sonic spectrogram of each cocktail garnish’s producing stage that violates the environment. Sound, as a mode of representation, is to “developing listening practices […] more about attending […] closely to responses that are already happening but which normally pass Unnoticed…” (Gallagher,622). By using the visual representation of scenery as the product detail, Spectrogram is to question and relink to “Drinking responsibly” with our proximity with the commercialized information and far apart environmental possession.

The drinking scene in the modern world is a composed reality in that we are artificially connecting, escaping, and excusing ourselves. We spontaneously under- paying attention to the assemblage and composition of daily scenary. Cocktails, as a medium in such cases, have always played a significant role in the Western world. From ordering to receiving the drink, each stage of situating in the drinking scene as a consumer is the precedence of each unpredictable and seducing social practice. The proximity between us and the garnishes is much further than the distance between us and the bar.  Social annotation of a cocktail is often more relishing than materiality. We hardly questioned the story behind the components of a flavor and the related reality, such as the passionfruit, what is their journey? Nor curious about that weird cucumber slice floating in our gin, how are they grown?   All these trivial but essential garnishes that have been neglected are dozens of calculated operations, coordinated processes, and years-long cultivation across continents. “There is often a spatial mismatch between the size of an object or subject from which a sound emanates and the spatial scale of the auditory space that the sound resonates within and fills” (Gallagher,624).

Spectrogram and Martini, in this case, capture and enlarge the duration of the supply and changing of the scenery provided by man labor and land resources that have been neglected and muted.

Reference:

Gallagher, M., Kanngieser, A., & Prior, J. (2017). Listening geographies: Landscape, affect and geotechnologies. Progress in Human Geography, 41(5), 618–637.