Cities and Memory - remixing the world

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."

Part of our Dada Sound project (February 2016) - see more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/dadasounds

By TMS.

Part of our Dada Sound project (February 2016) - see more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/dadasounds

By the School of Noise.

"We run an after school club for children aged 7-12. For the Cities and Memory project we decided to create two Dada technique inspired pieces for our sound piece. The first was a field recording which was taken inside the playground and the second is two cut-up poems about David Bowie. To change the field recording we decided to use aleatoric chance ideas to automate different effects. To do this we talked about different ways of changing sound; volume, pan, reverb, delay, distortion and tempo and drew a grid with number 1-8 along the y axis. One at a time the children rolled an 8 sided die to determine a number. They plotted this number on a chart with 8 being a high amount of that effect and 1 being a low amount. This process was then repeated for every effect. After a undetermined number of rolls they reached the end of the x axis (time). This chart was then plotted into Logic to automate the effects. The field recording was then added to this template to create the track. As well as the field recording the children made Dadaist inspired poems using a cut-up technique. This involved cutting out words from newspaper headlines on the day after David Bowie passed away. The words were put into a bag and pulled out randomly one by one to form the poems. This was a technique Bowie had used to create some of his lyrics. The poems have also been put through the automated effects as well as keeping some of it unedited."

Part of our Dada Sound project (February 2016) - see more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/dadasounds

By the School of Noise. "We run an after school club for children aged 7-12. For the Cities and Memory project we decided to create two Dada technique inspired pieces for our sound piece. The first was a field recording which was taken inside the playground and the second is two cut-up poems about David Bowie. To change the field recording we decided to use aleatoric chance ideas to automate different effects. To do this we talked about different ways of changing sound; volume, pan, reverb, delay, distortion and tempo and drew a grid with number 1-8 along the y axis. One at a time the children rolled an 8 sided die to determine a number. They plotted this number on a chart with 8 being a high amount of that effect and 1 being a low amount. This process was then repeated for every effect. After a undetermined number of rolls they reached the end of the x axis (time). This chart was then plotted into Logic to automate the effects. The field recording was then added to this template to create the track. As well as the field recording the children made Dadaist inspired poems using a cut-up technique. This involved cutting out words from newspaper headlines on the day after David Bowie passed away. The words were put into a bag and pulled out randomly one by one to form the poems. This was a technique Bowie had used to create some of his lyrics. The poems have also been put through the automated effects as well as keeping some of it unedited."

Part of our Dada Sound project (February 2016) - see more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/dadasounds

By Gabriela Yanez. "The used dadaist techniques in the piece are 2: abstraction, collage.

I wanted to use the original recording as the background of the reimagined piece, so assigned a denoiser plugin and placed automation points by instinct (abstraction). This gave me the quiet-to- noisy structure I based the rest on. Then, I edited bird sounds and camera noises from other takes, plus a new element, processing and arranging them, starting a collage 4-layer collage."

Part of our Dada Sound project (February 2016) - see more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/dadasounds

By Dave Santorum (ErisianLib).

"Collage, reappropriation, assemblage and abstraction.

The strand runs alongside the river and at the bridge end is a set of traffic lights. Irish lights have a distinctive sound and this beeping was cleaned, processed and used in place of oscillators in five synthesizers built in Native Instruments' Reaktor. Loops of manually cut beeps were also overlaid at the start and end of the piece. All synth parts, including the bass, were created from these samples, recorded and then processed with appropriate filters, amplifiers and reverb in Propellerhead Reason, which was the primary DAW. The drum sounds, comprising of two kits, were created from a sample of the waves at the jetty beside the Rowing Club hut at the far end of the Strand. These were cut and processed within the Kong drum machine - the unprocessed (but cut) correct samples without effects and pitching can be heard at the very end of the piece.

Chance played a good part in the process - the synthesizer with arpeggiation was random apart from the first two and final 16 bars. Also, it was my first time using Reaktor and so the fact that all the synths ended up working is more down to chance than to having any idea what I was doing."

Part of our Dada Sound project (February 2016) - see more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/dadasounds

By Dave Santorum (ErisianLib).

"Collage, reappropriation, assemblage and abstraction.

The strand runs alongside the river and at the bridge end is a set of traffic lights. Irish lights have a distinctive sound and this beeping was cleaned, processed and used in place of oscillators in five synthesizers built in Native Instruments' Reaktor. Loops of manually cut beeps were also overlaid at the start and end of the piece. All synth parts, including the bass, were created from these samples, recorded and then processed with appropriate filters, amplifiers and reverb in Propellerhead Reason, which was the primary DAW. The drum sounds, comprising of two kits, were created from a sample of the waves at the jetty beside the Rowing Club hut at the far end of the Strand. These were cut and processed within the Kong drum machine - the unprocessed (but cut) correct samples without effects and pitching can be heard at the very end of the piece.

Chance played a good part in the process - the synthesizer with arpeggiation was random apart from the first two and final 16 bars. Also, it was my first time using Reaktor and so the fact that all the synths ended up working is more down to chance than to having any idea what I was doing."

By Larry Crywater. "Sitting next to a main station, the recording I got was a sort of photomontage or collage naturally. It’s got quite a lot going on whilst at the same time, it remains fairly mundane, with only snippets of conversations. I like that you have to listen fairly intently and work out what was happening and who may have said what.

I made this field recording into what it is now through chance. I made this with the most ‘let-go’, non-planned, ‘see-what-happens’ approach I could, giving me the opportunity to thoroughly enjoy creating. I used instrument recording and tape recording techniques that I had just begun to play with previously.

The original tea cup on the saucer early in the original recording is something I wanted to try playing with rhythmically later in the track; this also came about by chance after realising I could loop it in this way."

Part of our Dada Sound project (February 2016) - see more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/dadasounds

By Anthony Lyons. "Initially, the original field recording was cut into a number of smaller audio files. This focused the material toward some of the more defined sounds in the multilayered original including tram bells, roller-coaster rattles, voices, waves on the beach, etc. The central Dada approach then was one of collage and assemblage of the original through the use of these smaller reconfigured audio files.

This resulted in both a linear reordering of sound and a textural or topographical change from the different combinations of layering and processing. The cut-up technique used often involved frequently small, micro even, fragments of the original combined with a high level of randomness creating a glitch-like atmosphere at times. The reimagined sound world is deliberately abstract and saturated at the start of the piece, but slowly becomes sparser and the sounds more defined ending with waves washing onto St. Kilda beach like in the original recording."

Part of our Dada Sound project (February 2016) - see more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/dadasounds

By Anthony Lyons. "Initially, the original field recording was cut into a number of smaller audio files. This focused the material toward some of the more defined sounds in the multilayered original including tram bells, roller-coaster rattles, voices, waves on the beach, etc. The central Dada approach then was one of collage and assemblage of the original through the use of these smaller reconfigured audio files.

This resulted in both a linear reordering of sound and a textural or topographical change from the different combinations of layering and processing. The cut-up technique used often involved frequently small, micro even, fragments of the original combined with a high level of randomness creating a glitch-like atmosphere at times. The reimagined sound world is deliberately abstract and saturated at the start of the piece, but slowly becomes sparser and the sounds more defined ending with waves washing onto St. Kilda beach like in the original recording."