Sounds
Field Recordings / Sonic Doodles
Field Recordings
These are a handful of recordings I've made over the last year or so. Most were recorded with LOM's Uši Pro microphones onto a Roland R26
recorder.
Late-night activity outside my flat, featuring trams, busses, mopeds, and groups of people wandering the streets. I really love these kinds of ambiences where you can get a real sense of how sounds can articulate space.
A binaural recording of Crookes Valley Park in Sheffield. Binaural recordings attempt to mimic human hearing by placing two microphones as far apart as our ears are, with some kind of head-like object inbetween, meaning it is best to listen to on headphones if possible. In this case, I clipped the microphones onto a hat I was wearing, so the head-like object was my head.
I was out for a walk in Weston Park when a helicopter landed on the grass, so I hurried back to fetch my R26 and got back just in time to capture the take-off.
A recording of a fast-flowing brook in Northumberland. This recording has been edited so that it can be seamlessly looped - below is an example of the 20 second clip being looped three times.
Musical Doodles
These are a few musical ideas I've sketched out, most often the results of playing around with my synthesiser until something nice comes out. These are by no means fully realised compositions - I see them more as aesthetically pleasing (to me at least) sounds which seem to suggest a certain mood or character. Most of them were recorded from the synth in one take without subsequent editing or layering, which I find to be a great way of changing my perspective on creating music - instead of having the freedom to infinitely edit and rearrange sounds, I have to put all my efforts into patching something interesting before even hitting record (although I do sometimes allow myself a little manual wiggling...).
A Krell patch is a specific method for allowing a modular system to speak for itself - the idea is to set up enough complex modulation over specific parameters in order to create an ever-changing series of sounds without any human input. I learnt the basics from here, and then expanded upon it with modulation of modulations, and by running the main vco through Mutable Instruments' Rings, which was in turn treated as a second vco. I found the patch worked really nicely at slower speeds to allow the gradual changes in timbre to really shine.
I was really happy with the expressive gestures in the bass in this recording. This is another product of my synth, although a lot of the sounds are being processed by MI Clouds, a really nice sonic granulation tool which I borrowed from a friend for a few months over summer.
This is a bit different from the others in that it wasn't the result of one unedited recording. It's the product of several recordings of chord pulses from the 4ms SMR, which were then layered with some reverb and distortions. Then I mixed that down and used this process to create a much more textural drone layer, which was then in turn stacked with different transpositions of itself and then mixed back in with the original recordings to retain individual attacks.
Recorded in one take. Pretty happy with the dubby bass here, this was one of those "ooft" patches that made me screw my face up (in a good way).
Another one-take recording. Something a bit more chaotic and noisy...
