In due time, aural snapshots will match their camera equivalent in frequency, in commonplaceness. The microphone embedded in so many devices — most notably cell phones, but also tablets, laptops, gaming devices — will be used casually, as well as expertly, to capture a moment by an ordinary tourist, or student, or business traveler. We’ll share these with friends and relatives, and thanks to the means by which tools such as Flickr, Instagram, Twitter, and, of course, SoundCloud have trained us, we’ll share them with strangers as well. These aural snapshots will be routine expressions of everyday mundanity and they will pay welcome witness to majestic documentary wonder.
And, of course, for some this future is already an accepted habit, or at least a habit in the making. Old Clone, a U.S.-based musician, recently posted this following montage of a trip to Chicago. It consists of 10 clips (“made on a little portable recorder”) stitched into a singular whole. In part that whole is simply a matter of it being one single track, a sequence with beginning and middle and end, but Old Clone also augmented the original material (“Stretched and bent, but mostly just shuffled around”), retaining its real-world-ness, but in turn providing a singular patina to the overall undertaking:
Old Clone credits an experiment by Robert Rizzi of Kolding, Denmark, with inspiring him. This appears to be the Rizzi track being referred to:
Old Clone track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/oldclone. Rizzi track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/rizzi.