Can you remember what playtime sounded like?

Walking along Whitecross Street in East London a few weeks ago, I passed a school with a rooftop playground at playtime. The location of the playground so high up meant the sounds of the children playing were drenched in reverb and flung around above the roofs of the street and seemed to be suspended in the air. Just in the same area was an industrial air conditioning vent that services the Barbican Centre, so the field recording drifts from children at playtime over to the throb of this machinery by the end.

For the remix, it was that ethereal sense of space and slight eeriness from the original recording that I wanted to bring out, so I’ve layered multiple drones all made from the original sound and lots of reverb together, and brought the sounds of children playing in and out of it, to create a sort of dream version of what playtime might sound like in an alternative world – I like the way that, for instance, the school bell chimes in every so often to call the children back into class.

City version:

Memory version:

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