We dispensed with all notions of ‘artificial’ sound design and just tried to create a new place, a feasible soundscape, from the relatively subtle additions of field recordings from other locations. Thus, in our ‘super field recording’, you can hear additions from locations in Sicily, Seville, Oxford and South Africa.
“The idea was to sum up the experience of a large train station – there’s always an urgency (suggested by the kick drum) and people rushing around. Lots of background sounds, maybe a moment of reflection before the rush starts again.”
“The idea was to magnify the sounds of nature, to make an ultra field recording, if you will, to get the sort of sound that it might be possible to get if all the clutter and congestion of human noise was removed. To listen to the seemingly quiet voice of nature, and find that it does, in fact, roar.”
“As I set about to reimagine the recordings, I felt that digitally altering and effecting the original recordings to invoke sounds of water was producing something more mechanistic, less human. The more I thought about it however, it seemed that i was producing something more ‘artificial,’ much in the sense that Oscar Wilde spoke of artifice. From this perspective, it seemed that as I introduced more artifice and restructuring in processing the recordings, I was marking this raw material as more human.”
Geoff Edwards from Canada listened to our recent piece on CBC national radio, in which we lamented the lack of Canadian sounds on the map, and set out to rectify it, sending us this recording of the clock chiming at a place called Five Corners
