- Maker: Briana Torres-Boone
- Genre: Project 2 – Soundscape
- Level: Graduate
- Program: Composition, Rhetoric, and Digital Media
- Course: WRIT 5800: Editing, Layout, and Design
- Instructor: Dr. Eric Mason
- Semester Created: Winter 2026
Description
For this project, I wanted to create a haunting sonic narrative about a man navigating grief. The piece is called The Bell Tolls, and it follows a man from a dock to a shoreline to a city street until a church bell triggers a dissociative episode pulling him back through memory and loss. He wakes to knocking at his door, and the whole journey reveals itself as a dream.
The soundscape was built entirely in Audacity using layered found sounds. The piece opens at the water, with ambient waves and footsteps on a dock. He sits. A harmonica starts. Then he says that he can’t. He gets up, walks the dock to the sand, and eventually moves through a city. He pauses when he hears children singing. Then the bell tolls, and everything shifts. The soundscape moves into something more dissonant and fragmented, replicating the experience of grief hitting without warning. A voice tells him to wake up. He does, to knocking at his door.
The harmonica signals intimacy and loneliness. The children singing creates an interruption, something alive and unbothered that cuts against his interior state. The bell is the turning point, the sound that collapses the present into the past.
Reflection
This project put a lot into perspective about what sound can carry on its own. I wanted the listener to understand who this man was and what he was feeling without narrating it to them directly. The harmonica had to signal a specific emotional register. The transition from dock to city had to feel like restlessness. The bell was that moment of dread that I wanted to capture, of knowing something was coming for you, but not knowing exactly what.
The biggest difference between this and a written draft is that the mistakes were audible immediately. A misplaced sound or an awkward transition broke the entire logic of the piece in real time. I rebuilt the middle section several times before the disassocation sequence.
I’m most satisfied with the opening sequence and the bell transition. I’m least satisfied with the ending, knowing that I could do more, maybe pull in an additional actor if I had more time to expand the narrative. I followed the convention of narrative arc, giving the piece a clear beginning, middle, and end. I intentionally broke the convention of sonic clarity, letting the dissociation sequence get uncomfortable and fragmented on purpose.
Hocks and Comstock were central to how I thought about this project. Sonic rhetoric gave me a framework for understanding sound as a composition and persuasion. It created an argument about grief and memory and the way the past interrupts the present without asking.
