We’re happy to have a new piece from long-standing contributor Dan Tapper as part of our Quiet Street project – as ever, he’s taken a fascinating approach to reimagining the sound using software designed for improv performance, as he explains below. He tackled Mike Bingham’s field recording from the busy tourist- and busker-packed central streets of Bath.

“The composition for the Tourists vs Buskers field recording is taken from an improvisation based around the original field recording. The material was processed in a piece of custom built software designed for improvisational performance called Ven_d.”

“Ven_d uses a graphical user interface similar to a Venn diagram to allow the user to gesturally move through a number of sound files or segments of one sound file.”

“In addition to moving through sound files in a gestural manner the software allows segments of audio to be captured using a series of controllable delays. This improvisation explores the software and the source audio by initially creating short gestural movements which gradually evolve into more textural material.”

“The original recording had a very rich sonic environment containing rhythmic, ambient and melodic material. For the composition I have chosen to highlight the melodic material – the buskers guitar, whistling, seagulls, short snippets of speech – morphing it into a textural drone, interspersed with the more rhythmic elements of the recording – dragging metal, footsteps, running water.”

City version:

Memory version:

Installation mix (best listened to on headphones):