About Faith
Finding Inspiration from Faith
Faith is one of the countless man-made products of the food industry for human use. Like the monster Frankenstein created, they are sentient beings without voices or choices. They live in factory farms for about 4 to 6 years, during which the males are mutilated, castrated to avoid boar taint for higher human palatability while the females are mutilated and confined in gestation crates, day after day, year after year, throughout their lives.
The sounds in Chapter 02 and 05 refer to such mutilation, all without anesthesia:
Teeth clenching - the teeth are clipped to avoid biting behavior under stress
Earsplitting - ears are chipped to mark their numbers
Balls ripping - testicles removed by cutting and ripping
Indeed, other mutilation procedures, such as tail docking, are not included in the description.
Who is Wayne?
As you may have found out in Chapter 8, Wayne Hsiung is a former attorney and a passionate animal activist. A co-founder of DxE (Direct Action Everywhere) he has openly rescued animals from horrible factory farms with his team in attempts to expose the hellish cruelty inside. The inhumane conditions include piles of dead piglets covered in feces and pregnant pigs crammed inside cages barely larger than their bodies. As of October 2022, Wayne and his partner were facing felony charges for having saved two pigs from the nightmarish Chinese-funded Smithfield Farms in Utah and had prepared himself for a possible 10-year-long jail term. To Wayne's own surprise, they won the Smithfield trial defending themselves despite all the unfavorable trial conditions imposed by court orders.
A story with music and sound journey
This is a project produced by IIME International Institute of Music Education, founded in 2015 by Michelana Lam and her students with the mission of promoting positive humanity values with music via community volunteer work. Raising universal and ecological consciousness to battle problems brought about by anthropocentrism in the zeitgeist of human and climate crisis is her top priority.
The sound in this project is created mainly from the contact of musical instruments with marbles and balls of different sizes and textures, symbolic of the eggs that give birth to offsprings and also the testicles being cut off. Some of the sounds come from marbles dropping onto the strings of a piano from a mechanism that keeps the marbles rolling, semiotic of the industrial operation. All sounds and cries are made with musical instruments.
The making of In You We Have Faith
Marbles running down an Amish machine to create sound effects
A pig castration mechanism that confines the pig head and hind limbs
Another marble mechanism that is symbolic of the industrialized system
Mother pigs in crates
Sound effects using marbles on piano strings
Moaning effects using rubber and balls of different sizes and textures on piano strings
Other animal cry effects using a bow on the harp
Other animal cry effects using a bow on the harp
From industry to home, Faith eventually ends in the domestic cooking tools. Here, their fate still evolves around a non-stop mechanism.
References
Direct Action Everywhere - DxE. Jul 6, 2017. Operation Deathstar with Wayne Hsiung and DxE - virtual reality [video]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlSE1X-hSqQ&t=349s
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Greenberg, A. (Dec 5, 2019). Meet the Activists Risking Prison to Film VR in Factory Farms. WIRED. https://www.wired.com/story/direct-action-everywhere-virtual-reality-exposing-factory-farms/
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Hsiung, W. (n.d.) Who is Wayne Hsiung? https://www.waynehsiung.com/meet-wayne
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McGlone, J. J. et al. (1993). The development of pain in young pigs associated with castration and attempts to prevent castration-induced behavioral changes. Journal of Animal Science. 1993, 71:1441-1446
Richards, J. (Oct. 8, 2022). Jury finds both defendants not guilty of all charges in high-profile burglary, theft case involving piglets. St. George News. https://www.stgeorgeutah.com/news/archive/2022/10/08/jmr-jury-finds-both-defendants-not-guilty-of-all-charges-in-high-profile-burglary-theft-case-involving-piglets/#.Y3XaoexBz8x
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Sutherland, M. A. et al. (2010). Physiology and behavior of pigs before and after castration: effects of two topical anesthetics. Animal, 4:12, pp 2071–2079
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Texas Tech University. (n.d.) Laboratory of Animal Behavior, Physiology and Welfare
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Towers, L. (2012.) How Pigs Are Typically Castrated, Swine Castration Webinar. The Pigsite
https://www.thepigsite.com/news/2012/09/swine-castration-webinar-announcement-1
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All contents are originally written, designed and composed by Michelana Lam @
IIME International Institute of Music Education.
Copyright @ 2022 Michelana Lam. All rights reserved.
For more information, please contact the author at michelana@michelana.com.
