SmithStBlues

Hi, Ben,
 
Pretty cool piece and a very interesting concept, using everyday ambient sounds as "virtual instruments"!
 
I would imagine that recording, categorizing and assigning the sounds is certainly no easy task, and then actually "playing" them as instruments for composition on your midi controller is where the real fun begins!
 
Anyway, very different and cool at the same time, nice work, I hope your professor likes it!
 
Best Wishes,
Bob
 

Ben, this is one of your most creative pieces, yet.  The mix is textured and interesting, especially knowing the sound sources.  Very cool, indeed!

Hi guys thanks for the positive comments, I need it. As far as the actual piece and making it, the hardest part was getting enough interesting sounds when I was on location. The actual building of the track was pretty easy, it's just a matter of listening to the source material and thinking about what you can use as say a kick, and this is easy you just have to listen to the frequencies of the source material. It's really amazing once you start listening to the sounds of the world how it stops sounding like sonic mush and starts sounding like music.

Cheers Ben

Hi John, I hear what you are saying but here is the rub and is the crux of your argument.  I've tried to get other projects over the line including analysing and recreating Beatle tracks...good for those who really want to learn about the art of production.  Improvisation using nothing more than the iphone/ipad combination still no go but this is what the academics want, or so I've been lead to believe and again I might be leading myself up the garden path on this one.
 
As for what I am trying to achieve with this project, well at the moment I'm still working this one out but after two attempts I am starting to figure this out.  Basically what I have done is recreate the sound map of the area I recorded and turned it into music.  Ok huh?  if you strip away the melody that I have imposed on top of the rhythm track you actually here the sounds of the street or the sound map.  Now what I have done is then gone this is how this area makes me feel.  So it's a street, the noises that you hear on this street are very repetitive, so hence the repetitive nature of the rhythm track.  The voices that you hear also are super important because they give the piece a narrative, the area it's self is one of disadvantage, if you listen carefully there is an indigenous person talking about her son and alcohol.  The area is also very dirty and grimy.  So what I have done is ok lets turn the sounds into a blue's sort of piece to represent the sounds and the area.  This is my interpretation of the area, my feelings about the area I live in.
 
It is weird, it's not "music" but it is art is music is noise, LoL.  Don't forget these experiments have been going on now for over a 100 years, starting with the futurists in 1909 and are basically a rebelling or was a rebellion at the time against the neo classical movement of the time.  And again this sort of project is an attempt at rebellion too, music is pretty staid and boring, possibly not to you but def for me.  So this my attempt to re-write the wheel, so to speak. 
 
And finally this is only my 2nd attempt at doing this and so far I have chosen rather dark grim subjects to paint but imagine what a park or a garden might sound like?  How do I represent a butterfly flying through the air on a summers day with only the sounds I have gathered in that park. 
 
So give me time to figure this stuff out, at the moment you are asking van gogh to paint sunflowers and he's only just been given his yellow paint.
 
Peace Ben

I like where you're going with these pieces.  Nice organic blues, with digital DNA. ;)

As an academic assignment I "get it".
 
As art or music I was bored.
 
But none of us are your professor. When you have the final product I'd be very interested in hearing it and then even more interested in the grade/rank/comments(whatever) of your professor.

Whatever to the naysayers, but musique concrète has been going on since the 1940s. The idea of finding the music that is in the environment all around you is just as legitimate as anything else.

I'll bet it's a trip up there in your head.  I couldn't really grasp which sound were which sounds in some cases but was thoroughly entertained trying to figure it out.  You're weird.