Oberlin’s TIMARA department is the butt of many jokes around campus, on account of the degree’s vague yet wordy title, Technology in Music and Related Arts, and the perceived quirkiness of its majors and faculty.
However, TIMARA isn’t a monolith. There are a variety of reasons why someone might pursue such a degree, from joining academia to kickstarting their electronic music career to becoming a music technology engineer.
But until Sarai Juarez Osorio’s Junior Recital on Saturday, February 28 in Stull Recital hall, I had never heard of a TIMARA student focused on film scoring or sound design. In the annals of TIMARA recitals, this one was relatively tame.
The first half featured rescorings of a variety of video clips, from the title sequence of The Crown to films like Wall-E, Monsters Inc. and The Lord of the Rings (don’t ask me which one). The rescorings themselves were unintrusive and unremarkable, matching the emotional cadence of the clips to a T. One might not have noticed that they weren’t the originals if it weren’t for the unmistakably canned sound of MIDI strings.
To her credit, Osorio clearly knows her stuff. The subtle variations in tempo and dynamics gave the scores a convincing degree of realism, and her by-the-book style certainly leaves no room for critique by the standards of orthodox cinematic scoring practice. Her rescoring of the 2012 Disney short Paperman featured her own sound design and special effects, gathered from field recordings and foley recorded during her time in London last semester as part of the Danenberg Oberlin-in-London Program. The quality of the sound design was impressive, though lacking in personality.
The second half featured a handful of electronic pop songs performed live or prerecorded by Osorio. It opened with a prerecorded cover of “Soñando,” a song written by her older sister Zaira Castillo. Osorio’s expressive voice was a perfect fit for the atmospheric, house-inflected instrumental, even sounding good on the muffled Stull speakers. The next two songs were both originals performed live to prerecorded backing tracks, with Osorio flexing her electric guitar chops on “Influencias” and displaying her rich vibrato on “Fantasia,” assisted by cellist Hannah Stone.
The beauty of being in TIMARA is getting to do what you want, no matter what the world thinks. While you would expect a TIMARA recital to take creative risks or offer up something unexpected, Osorio’s program didn’t disappoint. At the end of the day, if you’re a TIMARA major, perhaps the most TIMARA thing you can do is to do something completely normal.
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