Cities and Memory - remixing the world

Cities and Memory - remixing the world

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Cities and Memory - remixing the world episodes

  • Abstract dog sounds
    Part of our Dada Sound project (February 2016) - see more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/dadasounds
    By Marinna Guzy.
    "The two Dada techniques that I relied most heavily on in the creation of this work were abstraction and collage. I took the original recording of the pug snorting and used heavy processing, such as spectral isolation and granulation to acousmatize the sound by abstraction. I created two primary long-form beds, and then assembled my remaining processed iterations of the pug snort on top of them, creating a final collaged assemblage of sound. As the piece progressed, the sounds evolved into increasingly more acousmatic variations of the pug snort, before concluding with a slightly less abstracted sonic line to remind the listener of the origin— the pug snort— of the work."
    4 min
  • Boulder Mountain Park, Colorado
    Part of our Dada Sound project (February 2016) - see more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/dadasounds By Masha Sha.
    "According to Hans Richter, Dada represented the opposite of everything which art stood for. Dada was intended to offend. I asked myself how can i rebel against the rules of field recording and do something opposite. One of the biggest no no's in field recording is capturing the sounds of the person who is recording. That person should be breathless and invisible on the soundscape captured. That is why i decided to center my composition entirely on that kind of “wrong" sound.
    Every ism in art history denies the previous ism in order to manifest new aesthetic and meaning. That is why i thought ascending the mountain would be an appropriate metaphor.
    The composition is consist only from the recorded sounds of me ascending the mountain.
    I introduced chance to complete the composition by overlapping two identical tracks with slight delay."
    7 min
  • Missing the point twice (Boulder Mountain)
    Part of our Dada Sound project (February 2016) - see more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/dadasounds By Masha Sha.
    "According to Hans Richter, Dada represented the opposite of everything which art stood for. Dada was intended to offend. I asked myself how can i rebel against the rules of field recording and do something opposite. One of the biggest no no's in field recording is capturing the sounds of the person who is recording. That person should be breathless and invisible on the soundscape captured. That is why i decided to center my composition entirely on that kind of “wrong" sound.
    Every ism in art history denies the previous ism in order to manifest new aesthetic and meaning. That is why i thought ascending the mountain would be an appropriate metaphor.
    The composition is consist only from the recorded sounds of me ascending the mountain.
    I introduced chance to complete the composition by overlapping two identical tracks with slight delay."
    7 min
  • Snorting dog, Oregon
    Part of our Dada Sound project (February 2016) - see more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/dadasounds
    By Marinna Guzy.
    "The two Dada techniques that I relied most heavily on in the creation of this work were abstraction and collage. I took the original recording of the pug snorting and used heavy processing, such as spectral isolation and granulation to acousmatize the sound by abstraction. I created two primary long-form beds, and then assembled my remaining processed iterations of the pug snort on top of them, creating a final collaged assemblage of sound. As the piece progressed, the sounds evolved into increasingly more acousmatic variations of the pug snort, before concluding with a slightly less abstracted sonic line to remind the listener of the origin— the pug snort— of the work."
    1 min
  • Abbey Wood, London
    Part of our Dada Sound project (February 2016) - see more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/dadasounds
    By Peter Nagle.
    "Lesnes Abbey Wood is an ancient woodland on the very edge of Greenwich and Bexley boroughs, adjacent to the ruins of Lesnes Abbey. As well as being a nature reserve and a site of special scientific interest due to its bronze age features and fossil beds, it is home to a colony of parakeets, the descendents of escaped pets. This track is a collage of cut, stretched, filtered and processed versions of a single recording made in the wood in October 2015. Pehaps in these remodelled sounds of the wood's current inhabitants can be heard the ghosts of the old beasts lying bneath the earth in the fossil beds."
    4 min
  • Hearts (Bergen)
    Part of our Dada Sound project (February 2016) - see more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/dadasounds
    By Ross Whyte. "The original field recording used in Hearts was made with binaural microphones next to the Statsraad Lehmkuhl in Bergen, Norway. On the recording can be heard the sound of a small ferry boat approaching from across the bay of
    For Hearts, I chose to incorporate the radio play of Orson Welles’ production of Heart of Darkness (public domain). Conceptually, the aim was to recontextualise the sound of a calm, commonplace ferry crossing alongside elements of the much darker tale of a journey along the Congo River.
    The work adopts three dada techniques: abstraction, collage and photomontage. Abstraction is applied most prominently to the original field recording, in its use of time- stretching specific sounds (e.g. a single percussive beat of the ferry) and exaggerating the ‘presence’ of the ferry with increasing reverb and resonators. Collage is specifically utilised
    forth across the harbour every ten minutes throughout the day and its distinctive,
    Vågen. The ferry travels back and
    percussive sound is a key part of Bergen’s soundscape.
    with the recording of the radio play: short excerpts of dialogue, music, and radio static and interference are arbitrarily extracted from the recording, re-ordered and re-purposed. Finally, the overall tonal quality of the work is created through the use of (an interpreted version of) photomontage. To achieve this, three images were ‘sonified’ and superimposed on top of each other. These images were of a map of Bergen, a map of the Congo River, and a photo of an original page of manuscript from Joseph Conrad’s novella, Heart of Darkness, containing the famous line, “oh! The horror!”"
    7 min
  • Statsraad Lehmkuhl, Bergen, Norway
    Part of our Dada Sound project (February 2016) - see more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/dadasounds
    By Ross Whyte. "The original field recording used in Hearts was made with binaural microphones next to the Statsraad Lehmkuhl in Bergen, Norway. On the recording can be heard the sound of a small ferry boat approaching from across the bay of
    For Hearts, I chose to incorporate the radio play of Orson Welles’ production of Heart of Darkness (public domain). Conceptually, the aim was to recontextualise the sound of a calm, commonplace ferry crossing alongside elements of the much darker tale of a journey along the Congo River.
    The work adopts three dada techniques: abstraction, collage and photomontage. Abstraction is applied most prominently to the original field recording, in its use of time- stretching specific sounds (e.g. a single percussive beat of the ferry) and exaggerating the ‘presence’ of the ferry with increasing reverb and resonators. Collage is specifically utilised
    forth across the harbour every ten minutes throughout the day and its distinctive,
    Vågen. The ferry travels back and
    percussive sound is a key part of Bergen’s soundscape.
    with the recording of the radio play: short excerpts of dialogue, music, and radio static and interference are arbitrarily extracted from the recording, re-ordered and re-purposed. Finally, the overall tonal quality of the work is created through the use of (an interpreted version of) photomontage. To achieve this, three images were ‘sonified’ and superimposed on top of each other. These images were of a map of Bergen, a map of the Congo River, and a photo of an original page of manuscript from Joseph Conrad’s novella, Heart of Darkness, containing the famous line, “oh! The horror!”"
    2 min
  • Auto- Dada (Iceland harbour)
    Part of our Dada Sound project (February 2016) - see more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/dadasounds
    By TMS "The act of creating a field recording corresponds to the dadaist use of everyday material to undermine bourgeois culture, creating a so called non-art by using found objects and creating assemblages out of these materials.
    The remade piece auto-dada is created as an automated system that randomly applies cut up technique and montage to the original field recording. The piece is based on a randomness principle and thus avoids the control of its author, but succumbs to a purely automated process of chance. The system is created in Pure Data, which executes the applied methods on the original sound file."
    8 min

About Cities and Memory - remixing the world

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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.