Some resolutions stick, and some don’t. And some benefit from amendment. Taylor Deupree, musician and head of the record label 12k, started the new year with a plan to post one sound each day, and he’s pretty much stuck to it (at 12k.com/onesoundeachday).
Initially, these were all “found” sounds, plucked from the ether by his field-recording equipment, like one of the trains that he uploaded on Tuesday of this week: “one of my least favorite sounds in the world. … the sound is hellish and piercing. if you have to wait a while for the right train you get bombarded with these sounds. this recording does not do justice to the physical sensation of being there” (MP3).
The day prior, Monday of this week, Deupree slightly altered his daily regimen for the second time this year, by allowing for unnatural, electronically mediated sounds, rather than just raw audio — a loop of a ukulele: “i am still recording these sounds with my field recorder, so they retain a sense of removal, noise and otherwise roomy tone” (MP3).
It has the pulse of a Buddha Machine track, and would make for a good ring tone, which I mean as a compliment, in that it’s the sort of soundbite that one wouldn’t mind hearing throughout a given day, signaling the arrival of something nice, like a friend’s call or text message, or for that matter an automated reminder on a to-do list.