Cities and Memory - remixing the world

Cities and Memory - remixing the world

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Cities and Memory - remixing the world episodes

  • Madurai Dada
    Part of our Dada Sound project (February 2016) - see more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/dadasounds
    By Tom Miller.
    " I made the original field recording late at night in the streets of Madurai, India on the 28th of February, 1979. Sounds captured include street singers, bicycles, cars, a nagaswaram (south Indian double-reed instrument) and thavil (barrel-shaped drum) duet outside the walls of the Meenakshi temple, voices of children and adults (including a passerby commenting on the tape recorder), microphone handling noise, wind, footsteps, and a cow eating a pineapple. All of the sounds heard are generated from the original field recording with no added source material.
    Dada methods employed:
    Chance – random elements encountered on a midnight walk through city streets
    Cut-up – the original field recording has been spliced, glitched, and re-sequenced
    Collage – the sounds of the field recording are layered into a multitrack mix
    Assemblage – resultant drone and combinatorial effects from applying reverb and resonance filters "
    8 min
  • Sarbogard (reimagined train journey)
    Part of our Dada Sound project (February 2016) - see more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/dadasounds By Adam Krasz.
    "I created a collage of sounds recorded during my journey from Pécs to Budapest and my friend's, Kristóf Kovács (http://cargocollective.com/kristofkristof), sound poem I recorded with him in the Nehru Park, Budapest near the river Danube."
    16 min
  • Oversounding in Brazil
    Part of our Dada Sound project (February 2016) - see more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/dadasounds
    By Isabel Nogueira. "The techniques I used are collage, overpainting, chance and sound poems. I worked cutting parts of the field recording and modifying them by chance, reversing some other parts, making collages and overpainting (oversounding, in this case)."
    5 min
  • Outside the Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich
    Part of our Dada Sound project (February 2016) - see more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/dadasounds
    By Daniel Mackenzie.
    "The Dada principles applied to my alteration of the original recording concern the abstraction of sound and language, swapping the unconventional approach to syllabic form seen in the early 20th century for a contemporary alternative. I have misused a not particularly special piece of pitch correction software to dramatically alter the vowel sounds in the reading, almost removing them entirely from their source. What remains around these is most of the sibilance, and snippets of sonic ambience. Though famously anti facist, Dada sadly did very little to prevent the continuation of violence at the time. The effected sound hints at this in the subjective pointlessness of words stripped of substance, understandable by nobody, perhaps not even those responsible for their utterance."
    3 min
  • At the home of Dada
    Part of our Dada Sound project (February 2016) - see more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/dadasounds
    By Daniel Mackenzie.
    "The Dada principles applied to my alteration of the original recording concern the abstraction of sound and language, swapping the unconventional approach to syllabic form seen in the early 20th century for a contemporary alternative. I have misused a not particularly special piece of pitch correction software to dramatically alter the vowel sounds in the reading, almost removing them entirely from their source. What remains around these is most of the sibilance, and snippets of sonic ambience. Though famously anti facist, Dada sadly did very little to prevent the continuation of violence at the time. The effected sound hints at this in the subjective pointlessness of words stripped of substance, understandable by nobody, perhaps not even those responsible for their utterance."
    3 min
  • Electric storm, Mexico City
    Part of our Dada Sound project (February 2016) - see more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/dadasounds
    By Karina Villasenor.
    "One is the electric storm i work on (of my own original field recordings), and i made a kind of diptych history, reimagined the sound with two other different recordings and sound designs. The exact location of my original storm recording was in Dr. Carmona y Valle 123B, at the 6th floor of the building, in México City."
    7 min
  • Electric Storm Diptych, part two
    Part of our Dada Sound project (February 2016) - see more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/dadasounds
    By Karina Villasenor.
    "One is the electric storm i work on (of my own original field recordings), and i made a kind of diptych history, reimagined the sound with two other different recordings and sound designs. The exact location of my original storm recording was in Dr. Carmona y Valle 123B, at the 6th floor of the building, in México City."
    7 min
  • Electric Storm Diptych, part one
    Part of our Dada Sound project (February 2016) - see more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/dadasounds
    By Karina Villasenor.
    "One is the electric storm i work on (of my own original field recordings), and i made a kind of diptych history, reimagined the sound with two other different recordings and sound designs. The exact location of my original storm recording was in Dr. Carmona y Valle 123B, at the 6th floor of the building, in México City."
    7 min
  • Vancouver filter study
    Part of our Dada Sound project (February 2016) - see more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/dadasounds
    By Dylan van der Schyff.
    ""
    This ‘study’ began with a one-minute excerpt of a field recording made at a downtown Vancouver street corner. The original audio document was made with a zoom H6 with the microphones in an x/y configuration and manipulated using the TIAALS software. The TIAALS software was originally developed by researchers at the University of Huddersfield and Durham University to analyze electro-acoustic compositions. It allows the user to select areas of the recorded soundscape––represented on a spectrogram as a combination of time, frequency and amplitude––that may be either filtered or passed over. These areas may also be categorized and played back individually, affording some very interesting possibilities for sonic montage, collage etc.  
     
    A visual analogy of the filter study presented here might involve taking an image of the street corner and cutting out certain frequencies of light (color, intensity etc.) so that the remaining information is 'abstracted' from the original and becomes something 'new', while still retaining key features of the original document. And indeed, one can still discern the sounds of the buses, voices, street crossing signals and the busker playing the erhu on the left of the audio image (as well as the small patch of distortion caused by a sudden gust of wind). However, thanks to the filtering process, these everyday sounds may now be engaged with in a radically new way.
    Along these lines this ‘filter study’ resonates with Duchamp’s notion of a ‘ready made’. Nothing has been ‘added’ to the resulting audio. However, like Duchamp’s urinal, bicycle wheel or bottle rack, sonic objects found in mundane experience are detached (filtered) from their normal contexts (e.g. urinal/men’s restroom) and manipulated in various ways in order to aestheticize them."
    2 min
  • Vancouver street corner, Canada
    Part of our Dada Sound project (February 2016) - see more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/dadasounds
    By Dylan van der Schyff.
    ""
    This ‘study’ began with a one-minute excerpt of a field recording made at a downtown Vancouver street corner. The original audio document was made with a zoom H6 with the microphones in an x/y configuration and manipulated using the TIAALS software. The TIAALS software was originally developed by researchers at the University of Huddersfield and Durham University to analyze electro-acoustic compositions. It allows the user to select areas of the recorded soundscape––represented on a spectrogram as a combination of time, frequency and amplitude––that may be either filtered or passed over. These areas may also be categorized and played back individually, affording some very interesting possibilities for sonic montage, collage etc.  
     
    A visual analogy of the filter study presented here might involve taking an image of the street corner and cutting out certain frequencies of light (color, intensity etc.) so that the remaining information is 'abstracted' from the original and becomes something 'new', while still retaining key features of the original document. And indeed, one can still discern the sounds of the buses, voices, street crossing signals and the busker playing the erhu on the left of the audio image (as well as the small patch of distortion caused by a sudden gust of wind). However, thanks to the filtering process, these everyday sounds may now be engaged with in a radically new way.
    Along these lines this ‘filter study’ resonates with Duchamp’s notion of a ‘ready made’. Nothing has been ‘added’ to the resulting audio. However, like Duchamp’s urinal, bicycle wheel or bottle rack, sonic objects found in mundane experience are detached (filtered) from their normal contexts (e.g. urinal/men’s restroom) and manipulated in various ways in order to aestheticize them."
    2 min

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Cities and Memory remixes the world, one sound at a time - a global collaboration between artists and sound recordists all over the world.