Musique Concrète & Field Recording
For this project, I drew from areas such as musique concrète and field recording to produce a concept-led four-track EP.
The production of this EP revolved around a specific parameter: I could only rely on my own field recorded audio as the basis for the entire production.
Every sound and musical component had to derive from an ‘ordinary sound’ I had captured within my environment…
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To enhance this idea, I chose to make the environment in which I captured these sounds a fundamental part of the project’s concept, deciding to capture all audio within a 14th-century medieval village.
I thought the village offered a complex recording space that was rich with diverse audio sources, and found the striking blend of nature and man-made artificiality particularly interesting.
Therefore, I chose to record sounds that highlighted this contrast - on the one hand capturing many natural sounds, such as:
birds chirping, wind rustling, water flowing…
While on the other hand capturing many ‘unnatural’ or human-made sounds, for instance:
machinery, engines, construction work, old church bells ringing, footsteps on concrete floors…
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The space I captured these samples within then became equally as important as the sounds themselves - e.g. indoors vs. outdoors, large rooms vs. small rooms - as I found these distinctions helped imbue the recordings with a sense of varying character.
For example, the village church became a key indoor space. It featured an inherently rich and complex character due to its vast size and intricate shape, and I recorded many sounds in there, from muffled talking, to shuffling footsteps, and even the aged church piano.
The varied selection of natural outdoor recordings, contrasted with the human-derived indoor recordings I collected worked together to create a nuanced palette of raw material from which I could then create.
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The production and composition process also centred around the contrast been ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ sounds.
I implemented many experimental production approaches & techniques to take these initial field recordings and shape them into completely new musical ideas.
For example:
granular synthesis
audio warping / time stretching
transposition
compression (parallel and multi-band)
EQ (subtractive, additive, surgical)
harmonic distortion
saturation
bit crushing and sample rate manipulation
creative reverb stacking / processing
re-sampling
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Additional info:
It was autumn at the time of recording, and the turn of seasons was all around. This influenced me to add one final thematic layer to the project - one that took direct inspiration from the cyclical nature of the seasons, and from life more generally: the perpetual movement from emergence, to decay. I therefore conceptualised the flow of the track list to reflect this cycle, using the first track to communicate a sense of emerging life, and the last track to convey its inevitable decay.
This circular structure of the EP thus follows a journey from emergence (spring), to order (summer), to decay (autumn), before ultimately returning to the beginning and resuming the cycle once more.
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Below you can watch some visualisers I created for each track…