Finished Audio Compositions

We were asked this week to create two compositions from our field recordings, one as a team composition and one as an individual composition.


Group Composition

Our Group composition has not been as effective as I might have hoped. We got quite enthusiastic with our recordings and have in effect recorded too much to process in such a short time. We have two major themes in our recordings; one is dark sounds, that we created in the structures at North Head while the other is a steep contrast and is domestic sounds captured from within our own homes.

To process this much information and to deal with the opinions of an entire group we decided to randomly select a number of recordings and combine these with the aim of working with exactly with what each recording contained and and not trying to control their content. This idea stemmed from the idea that all sounds are vibrations and thus cannot be right or wrong although conventional music would have us believe otherwise.

While I think it was a nice notion to combine different sound and allow their content  to speak for themselves I do not think it produced a particularly effective result. There was a lot of pollution and accidental sounds that were used and this non selective process didn't really encourage cohesion within the piece.


North Head Composition (Individual)

For my individual recording I have used sounds exclusively from the North Head location. These sounds stood out to me for their dark quality as well as the fact that they seem to work together as they were either created or recorded while in one location, this helped me with the idea of a 'sound picture'.
There is quite a wide range of sounds in the clip, although I wanted to stay largely away from making it a musical piece I did decide to include a beat as it was the darkest and deepest sound in my palette and there was a large amount of resulting reverberation that really sets the mood of the piece.
I have also included voices captured from others touring the caves as they are usually of children and are high and thus give maximum contrast (as well as inspiring a level of concern in the listener in hearing children in such a dark setting.)
I have used the beat centrally in the composition while the voices play solely in the right ear and other sounds gravitating towards the left

My individual composition is quite different from our group composition in that with the group recordings we had such a range of contrasting recordings that we dealt with the composition by random selection. As a result the composition was made up almost entirely of domestic sounds and on reflection is a little lackluster, I think that a bit more critical reflection and educated selection could have produced a more conjusive piece of work.