Disquiet

Before reading anything else, before reading any further, or clicking on a link, give this a listen. Just hit play and listen. And don’t dig in too deep. Hold off on listening for tone, or for dynamics, for narrative or processing. In essence, hold off on any of the kind of interpretive listening that this site is about on a daily basis. Instead, just listen and just focus on one task. The task is to try to identify the sound:

When you’ve got a solid guess, head over to the link below, where a consensus has built regarding its identification. The track is by Scanner, whose work deserves the sort of listening admonished against above. This track isn’t Scanner exploring sound. It is Scanner assisting others in exploring sound. It’s part of a broader project, which he explained when he posted the audio:

“Minute of Listening is a creative learning project through which Sound and Music hopes to enable every child in the country to gain access to a huge diversity of music and sound and, for sixty seconds each day, to focus on the richness and enjoyment of the act of listening. Children from the ages of 3 to 11 will be participating with their class teachers, testing a variety of approaches to engaging with Minute of Listening and exploring the act of listening.”

The project began on January 4 of this year and runs through March 30. Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/scanner. More on Scanner (aka Robin Rimbaud) at scannerdot.com. More on the project at soundandmusic.org:

And, yes, the image up top is of Scanner at age 6.

The great TouchRadio podcast series has gotten more delightfully inscrutable as time has passed. Once upon a time, it was dependable for raw field recordings of high sonic quality and often intrepid subject matter, along with occasional works in which field recordings were among the multifariously transformed source material. As time has passed, the variety of the podcast entries has expanded to include, among other things, orchestral works and spoken word. But while the variety has grown, the information associated with the tracks has tended to decrease; often as not there is essentially no explanatory text, leaving the listener to sort things out by his or her own, often by using Google to find corresponding information based on a small handful of facts. That path has, perhaps, reached its apex with a quarter-hour MP3 live recording attributed to no one and, by all appearances, containing just the quiet coughing and otherwise patient if low-level noise-producing waiting of an audience at the CMT festival last month in Berlin.

The photo up top was associated with the MP3 when it was posted by TouchRadio, which attributed the image to Mike Harding, who is half of the Touch label’s management (along with Jon Wozencroft). At the touchradio.org.uk website, there is little if any information, just this single line: “Recorded live at Passionskirche, Berlin @ Spire Live, closing CTM12.”

The recording captures an audience waiting together for an event to occur. The document now persists as something a second, asynchronous audience listens to, waiting for it to reveal its meaning.

Track originally posted at touchradio.org.uk. More on the festival at ctm-festival.de.

The combination of performed and everyday sound is a many-splendored thing. Often as not, the former is provided a backdrop by the latter. The relative distinctions lend much of such a work’s tension. The performed music expresses the impact of the human mind and physicality on an instrument, while the everyday noises express the external chaos of life beyond our control. It’s a kind of after-and-before shot of the cooked and the raw of the noise of our lives: that which we make of sound, and the sounds that surround us. Different musicians handle the balance in different ways, sometimes leveling the playing field, making the distinction between these two sides less self-evident, perhaps by “playing” the everyday sounds through sampling and processing, or perhaps by bringing random or less formal elements into their own playing.

In the track “Scattered” by ioflow, the procedure was as follows: after improvising on an electric piano, he “then went out to the park to capture some sounds. it was a bitterly cold, intermittently rainy day. came back and combined the two recordings, slicing, processing, effecting, and sequencing.” It’s a lovely combination. Indeed, the processing of the “real” sounds and the electronic nature of the “played” sounds helps find a common ground. Perhaps the strongest association, though, is provided by the improvised nature of the piano playing, the loose correlation of melodic elements that engages the imagination rather than directing it as a formal composition might have.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/ioflow/scattered. More on ioflow, aka Josh Saddler, at museimpromptu.net and twitter.com/ioflow.

Sonic source material exists anywhere and everywhere. Often the most ordinary sounds yield the most fantastic results, and not only because their content is so ignored as to serve as a secret well of audio fodder. Perhaps the main reason everyday noises can yield alarming results through experimental electronic audio processing is because by focusing on these sounds, the composer employing them simultaneously exposes the noises elsewhere, and in turn asks what is inside of those sounds. If, for example, the supermarket doors that serve as Ambienteer‘s quotidian muse in a recent track can yield the sort of anxiety generally associated with a Francis Bacon portrait, what of other doors: the locked one that leads to the bedroom, or the mechanical one enclosing the garage, or the hinged one that covers the front of the oven?

He explains his process on “Automatic Doors” as follows:

This v.experimental piece is a recording taken 5/3/2012 of the automatic doors of a supermarket in Addlestone, Surrey. It’s a really amazing sound yet I can’t think why they’ve chosen such noisy, if harmonic motors.

I’ve simply layered three versions of the recording, each warped a little in pitch, to thicken things, and slightly effected the overall mix with some eq and a little reverb.

I hear a sound that reminds me of childhood days playing in tower block lifts, with the sound of the wind whistling through the elevator shafts in which we travelled along with the clunks, clicks and the singing electrical motors.

The result is a quietly harrowing tour, the rattling of chains as if in some paraphysical prison. Often a fade-out can sound at a track’s end like an easy way out for the composer, the close of a piece of music just decreasing in volume until it hits silence. But here, it is as if some nightmare train is slowly pulling away from the station, going into the dark distance. And just as it’s almost out of earshot, there is one final primal whine.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/ambienteer. More on Ambienteer, aka James Fahy, at ambienteer.com and twitter.com/ambienteer. He’s based in Guildford, Britain.