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.