A sonic arts piece.
In 2016, Age UK found that people who live in cities are lonelier than those who don’t. This mirrors my experience first moving to London and I wanted to write a piece about it.
I set out to record iconic sounds from around London and sounds that I would encounter on the daily. These consisted of the gate to my accommodation, the Thames, the Tube (and its stations), escalators, busses, traffic light spinners (very noticeable at night!), pianos and many more. My piece just uses these sounds as starters.
A lot of the sounds were noise-based, so I focussed on texture a lot and combinations of sounds that worked together. I used automation to create ‘whooshes’ of sound (that I thought were like my memories of the day) and create momentum. I combined the use of tonal and noise sounds to avoid ear fatigue. The piece was created on Logic Pro X for the most part. I also used Spear and Audacity to create new sounds. Vocoders, reverbs, extreme time-stretching and EQs were particularly useful to create pads of sound. I most enjoyed extracting tones from field recordings using EQ and using granular synthesis to create synth pads that sounded beautiful. I used Pentes, by Smalley, as inspiration, after listening to how the piece moves from heavily processing sounds, to slowly revealing a few of the original sources and environments. My piece uses a similar structure, using the sound of the gate (processed and raw) as a motif throughout. The gate also has symbolic meaning, as it I would exit it to step away from my reclusively. It becomes more literal throughout the piece to depict how, gradually, I felt less alone in London.
