One of my students asked me to do an interview about why I settled on sound design and teaching as my career path. I thought it might be helpful for incoming Flashpoint students if I re-printed the transcription.
The interview was conducted by Dan Newman, one of the inaugural Rec Arts students, now awaiting his second year at Flashpoint.
April 2008
Dan Newman: You seemed to have established yourself well in the field of sound design, can you talk about how you got started in the industry?
John Murray: I suppose it all started with a love for sound, and a thirst to capture it, harness it, manipulate it, and to tell a story with it.
My first recording device was a cheap portable Panasonic cassette recorder / player. I carried it with me everywhere. I was about nine years old. Once I discovered that I could start and stop recordings with the “PAUSE” button, and in effect, string together snippets of audio, there was no stopping me. Although I didn’t recognize it as such at the time, it was a way that I could “edit.” Much like a film editor tells a story by “editing” together discontinuous moving image sequences, I was editing little pieces of unrelated audio that once compiled together told a story that was formerly only present in my imagination.
That primitive methodology evolved through middle school until I became dissatisfied with the lack of precision. After all, the PAUSE button was mechanical, housed inside a really cheap device. I wanted the ability to make “cuts” that were absolutely, and precisely, in time with the music I was using. So around the time I started high school, I began meticulously taking apart cassette casings, carefully pulling the tape off the reels, cutting it with scissors at exact moments, rearranging the pieces and using scotch tape to mend the seams back together.
By the time I got to college and was allowed to use “professional grade” open reel tape recorders, splicing blocks, grease pencils, razor blades, and real bona fide splicing tape, I was completely hooked.
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