Noise Challenge #4: The Soundtrack
Choose one song on your mp3 player and choose one day this week (or multiple days if you wish) to play this song on repeat. On these days, you are only allowed to listen to this one song. Listen to it when travelling to work or school. Listen to it on your lunch break. Take a long walk and listen to it again, and again, over and over. Let the song infiltrate your everyday experience. You have 1-week to create some kind of response to this multi-sensory experience.
I don’t listen to music on headphones at all when out and about in Berlin. Like most cities it’s too noisy, and I don’t want to damage my ears by cranking the music so I can hear, and in a sense feel it. Sometimes if you are listening to something dense it can work at lower levels. I often listen on headphones at home, either when people are sleeping or to check a sound mix I am working on.
For this task I focused on my point about not been able to hear the music properly, without outside, unwanted interference. Currently I am listening to acousmatic, ultra-minimal, or soundscape type music, very chilled most of the time with lots of low-level detail. While it can be interesting sometimes to have the outside world “join in” and contribute sounds, most of the time this is undesirable. So, I decided to reverse the situation. The track I chose to listen to repeatedly was a nu disco/house track I made some time ago, called Vega. Using a technique called concatenative synthesis (fancy!), also sometimes called Mosaicing, I used the audio from the 3 previous challenges as a source material database, and the track Vega as the “target.” The result of this process and what you hear is what the 3 source files have in common in terms of frequency, amplitude, and dynamics with Vega. All you hear ARE the outside sounds, with the target track “playing” the source material. As the first 3 pieces spoke about the environment I am in, I thought it appropriate to use them. I could of used additional source material but I wanted this piece to connect to the other works and to the project. This is a process piece entitled Corpus Callosum.
Alan Gleeson 