Stolen Sounds
July 19th 2005
Stolen Sounds is a composition born of travel and eavesdropping and as such it celebrates people watching and simple curiosity. It is a piece born of process as much as an editorial hand, so I’ll describe that process.
The principal tool used in the work is a piece of software I developed in Max/Msp. It uses seven granular modules, each geared towards a different type of sound, each highly editable, and a flexible routing system of LFOs and effects. I use this tool as described below.
I sit on a train going from Bristol to London. I open my laptop and plugin my headphones and open the tool. I start recording into the software, sounds from the train, the passengers, the pulse of the landscape. I play with the sounds, their frequencies, their speeds, their composition, while I record more. People talk and are stretched into bees, the train thrums and is made into a metal soup of ball bearings. I am in an enclosed headphone space, in a streaming audio world of recorded noise and mediated noise.
As I eavesdrop I record the output of my audio stream and when I arrive back in the studio I go through what I have gleaned, stolen, and the editing begins. I tend to be guided by the material at this stage, so the resulting composition is guided not just in content, but also in form, by the audio spying and the processes each sound inspired in me. The final piece is essentially a compilation of moments that grew from my eavesdropping on the train.
Stolen Sounds will be part of SoundLAB VII in March 2010.