Big Ben vs. Hamley’s toy store
A blend of two locations and two field recordings with very different characters and sonic properties today, as Alexander McHattie picked out two of our recordings to tackle.
The first is the iconic sound of London’s Big Ben clock tower, on this occasion striking 4.00pm.
The second is from Hamley’s toy store inside Heathrow airport’s Terminal 5 – a display of toys making noises, crashing into barriers and creating some interesting little sonic loops of the type you wouldn’t normally find in an airport environment.
Having picked two recordings, we dealt the Oblique Strategy cards Look at the order in which you do things and Repetition is a form of change, and here’s what happened next:
“I took the two cards as quite literal or practical working modes. Using the first as an advocation for looping a number of repetitive phrases chopped from the two sounds used.”
“The second to re-examine a common process of production, rather than adding effects or loading preferential parameters used in previous sessions and then tweaking them to achieve desired results.”
“I began by using familiar modules in their raw form and exploring the limits of their customisation, finding editable parameters in deeper menus beyond those I have previously used.”
City version – Big Ben:
City version – Hamley’s at Heathrow:
Memory version: