Following up from my recording session in Canary Wharf I did some audio recording in south bank – walking from elephant and castle station to the London Eye. I noticed that these audio recordings are a lot more chaotic, static and dynamic compared to the other two, with vary quite parts and loud parts. There is more conversation, car noises and sound moving at different paces. It definitely a change of pace from the other recordings and will be interesting to see how it fits into the piece.
I chose this specific route as it was the route i did my first sound walk on and a route i find calms me. It’s a route that changes in sonic dynamic as much as its physical dynamic – passing under bridges, through tunnels and different alleys. You see how with the movement of different atmospheres, voices and sound reverberate and echo more. As i draw closer to various drones and echos they become louder and more prominent. Its very interesting to the movement between more industrial manmade sounds to the transition to birds singing, less car noises and enquiring stillness.
The sound recording is around half an hour long, so i will have to cut out certain parts that probably don’t reflect what im trying to achieve as much. Im still figuring out whether or not i should include the more chaotic parts, perhaps it would add an interesting twist into an otherwise very minimal piece. I think the recording is an intriguing outlook on Londons sonic environment – a cluster of industrial noises that overtake snippets of stability.
“In 2015, composer Max Richter worked with a neuroscientist to create Sleep, an eight-and-a-half-hour, night- long concept album, or “personal lullaby for a frenetic world and a manifesto for a slower pace of existence”, as he put it. Sleep’s release was accompanied by listening sessions in which the audience was given beds for the night: for one, Richter and other musicians performed the entire piece live (setting two Guinness World Records for both the longest live and longest radio broadcast of a single piece of music). When I went to a Sleep playback event—a pyjama party of sorts on a shop floor—the experience was profound. Listening back to the record, I realized that I’d heard less than ten minutes of it, instead dozing into the longest snooze I’d had in years. Maybe that was its scientific alchemy; maybe, too, it’s the product of listening with a rare intensity and purpose.“
I found this specific paragraph from an article on calming music by elephant. It mentions the composer Max Richter who creates the piece ‘sleep’ where the therapeutic nature of the music is vital element behinds it’s natively genuine feel.