10+ sound collages in 2 hours
An in-class exploration in which you will create a series of “soundscapes” or
“sonic pictures” that operate within some specific parameters.

Goals:

1. To consider the importance of context by combining a variety of sounds.
2. To explore contrast and harmony through sound.
3. To explore some of the principles from your other courses in the context of sound.
4. To create your own short album of soundscapes and upload them as a set in Soundcloud.

Materials tools and methods

• The source material for this project comes from the collected sounds in the Soundcloud Listening Lab Group
• You may use any multi-track editor that you have access to such as Audacity or Garage Band.
• You should utilize trimming tools, volume tools, fade in and out tools to explore sound dynamics in your pieces.
  Details about some tools can be found below.
  Is the sound collage seamless and flowing with subtle interjections of sound or is it full of unexpected and surprising bursts of sound?
  The way that you edit it will impact the way that we hear it.
• You may only use the sounds recorded in NYC and Atlanta.
• You may not add any additional effects or processing to the sounds (like echo or reverb)
• Some important tools in Audacity
  • Selection, Envelope and Move tools
    in the bar at the top of the editing window.
    Also, don’t forget the zoom tool so you can get in close and make fine edits.

• • Volume and Pan (balance left or right)
    These tools are on the left side of every track you import.

    

  • Edit Menu
    Lots of important commands here including:
    Cut, Split, Trim, split delete, join, silence audio, etc.

  • Tracks Menu
    Add new audio track (mono), Add new Stereo Track
    If you want to paste some sound from another file into a new track, you’ll need to make a track first!

  • Effects Menu
    There are a few tools here you can use for this project.
    Fade In. select the beginning of a sound. It will create a gradual fade in.
    Fade out. select the end of a sound. It will create a gradual fade out.
    Normalize. this will raise the volume of a quiet track. Careful, it also amplifies unwanted noise!

Here are the Sound Collages that you will create

1. NYC The documentary.
Length 30 seconds (file name: New York – your name – documentary)
Take one of the interviews. Try to combine it with sounds that “illustrate” the thing that the person is talking about.
Don’t have the right sound? Experiment with others to understand the way that it works. Choose the best one.
Consider the following: is the mix of sounds such that you can understand the speaker? Is the sound continuous? Does it appear at a specific moment? Does it add atmosphere or tension?

2. NYC The manufactured soundscape
Length 30 seconds (file name: New York – your name – manufactured)
Create a believable  NYC sound scape by combining 2 or more NYC sounds.
What kind of environment are you creating?

3. NYC The disjunctive soundscape (disjunction = a separation, a condition of opposing parts. It is the opposite of united)
Length 30 seconds (file name: New York – your name – disjunction)
Create an  NYC soundscape by combining 2 or more contradictory sounds. What kind of environment are you creating?
An extreme example: the sound inside a church combined with the sounds from a chicken coop.

4. ATL+NYC #1: Manufactured Soundscape
Length 30 seconds (file name: New York – your name – atlanta 1)
Create a believable  soundscape by combining 2 or more sounds from NYC and Atlanta.
Bring these two worlds together.
An extreme example: the sound inside a church combined with the sounds from a chicken coop.

5. ATL+NYC #2: disjunctive Soundscape
Length 30 seconds (file name: New York – your name – atlanta 2)
Create a disjunctive soundscape that contrasts these two locations.

6. Urban rhythm study
Length 30 seconds (file name: New York – your name – rhythm)

7. Texture study
Length 30 seconds (file name: New York – your name – texture)
Create a soundscape that explores the qualities of the sounds uploaded (timbre).
Here are some of the ones that you listed in our class vocabulary:

aggressive
banging
beeping
bombastic
booming
clicking
drone
howling
hushed
jangling
metallic
mumbling
rattling
roaring
screeching
sharp
smooth
spitting
squealing
sweeping
thumping
whining
whooshing

8. Design vocabulary study 1
Length 30 seconds (file name: New York – your name – vocab 1)
Create a soundscape that sonically explores one or two of these design vocabulary or gestalt principles .
In your soundcloud description, include the terms you were exploring.
- number/frequency/density
- sequence or alternation
- focal point, dominance
- similarity
- proximity
- figure/ground (can you play with this sonically?)

Here’s Susan Stillman’s vocabulary presentation
Here’s Susan Stillman’s gestalt presentation

9. Design vocabulary study 2
Length 30 seconds (file name: New York – your name – vocab 2)
Create a soundscape that sonically explores one or two of these design vocabulary or gestalt principles  (use ones you didn’t explore in your last study!).
In your soundcloud description, include the terms you were exploring.
- number/frequency/density
- sequence
- alternation
- focal point, dominance
- similarity
– proximity
– figure/ground (can you play with this sonically?)

10. Your own soundscape
Length 1 minute (file name: New York – your name – mine)
Create whatever you would like from the files.
Consider the techniques you have expolored so far.

Post your final sound collages to Soundcloud

Once they are uploaded, add them to the set with your name.
A set is like a little playlist.
You’ll find the add to set button at the top of each track.

How to change the batteries.
Be sure not to throw out the batteries, they are rechargeable!
Rechargeable batteries have been marked with red tape. Please return them with the recorder.

How to adjust the width of the stereo field (Mid-Side Recording)
Want to include some of the action behind you as you record?
Maybe decrease it’s volume a bit? Adjust the settings while you are in MS mode (Mid-Side recording).

This is the recording we listened to in class recently.
Plug in some headphones and listen this time. How is it different?

This Weekend. Open House New York

This is a yearly opportunity to visit locations in New York that you might not be open to the public.
They fill up quick. Many are already full sadly, but look at the OHNY website to see what kinds of amazing things are in this city.
You can see what’s already filled up by looking at the Updates page.

Here are a couple of my own recommendations:

Mapping Resources
Recommended listening (Highly recommended actually)
This American Life – Mapping – 12:23 excerpt

Links to mapping websites and other sites
that deal with visualizing complexity.

John’s Diigo mapping links

And don’t forget John’s Mapping Presentation!

here’s the direct link

Materials for This week!
You will have some time to prototype your map ideas in class.

• Bring materials that you can use to test ideas for your map.
• These materials are meant for exploration, not finished product. Think PLAY.
• Additionally be sure to bring your journal (as usual) your sketchbook, and drawing supplies.

The purr of a leopard close up against a baobab tree, waiting. Whales surfacing, breathing in cold air. Coll starling imitate the noise of farm machinery from the hollow ring of a ruined bothy. The rattle of wood over a black stream… Chris Watson’s second CD is a dramatic contrast to the spacious atmospheres of “Stepping into the Dark” (Touch TO:27, 1996). Featuring 22 close-up recordings of animals, birds and insect life, “Outside the Circle of Fire” enlarges our awareness of the sound universe, intimate with voices from the past. There is an intensity here that television pictures cannot conjure.

– Touch

Edward Burtynsky. 'The end of oil' - SOCAR Oil Fields #4 Baku, Azerbaijan, 2006

Peter Cusack, based in London, works as a sound artist, musician and environmental recordist with a special interest in environmental sound and acoustic ecology. Projects move from community arts to research into the contribution of sound to our senses of place to recordings that document areas of special sonic interest, e.g. Lake Baikal, Siberia, and Xinjang, China’s most western province. Recently involved in ‘Sound & the City’ the British Council sound art project in Beijing 2005. His current project ‘Sounds From Dangerous Places’ examines the soundscapes of sites of major environmental damage, e.g. Chernobyl, the Azerbaijan oil fields, controversial dams on the Tigris and Euphratees river systems in south east Turkey.

Mute Button, took place on a Sunday in early May 2011 at the Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn, where a large group of street actors blended in with the environment. At predetermined intervals, the performers behaved as if a “mute button” had been pressed. For example, a couple in a loud argument suddenly became inaudible, though their mouths continued to move. A man playing a saxophone in front of a tip jar suddenly became silent, though he seemed to still be playing. A group of breakdancers putting on a show had their music abruptly muted, though they continued dancing as if they could hear it. A small crowd watched them and laughed and cheered, silently. While the sounds and silence of these actions alternated on and off, passersby unexpectedly and suddenly found themselves aware of the sounds of the urban landscape.

From Stillspotting

Worldwide one of a kind, the Vegetable Orchestra performs on instruments made of fresh vegetables. The utilization of various ever refined vegetable instruments creates a musically and aesthetically unique sound universe.

The Vegetable Orchestra was founded in 1998. Based in Vienna, the Vegetable Orchestra plays concerts in all over the world.

There are no musical boundaries for the Vegetable Orchestra. The most diverse music styles fuse here – contemporary music, beat-oriented House tracks, experimental Electronic, Free Jazz, Noise, Dub, Clicks’n'Cuts – the musical scope of the ensemble expands consistently, and recently developed vegetable instruments and their inherent sounds often determine the direction.

- From the vegetable Orchestra’s website