Musique Concrète

 

It was time to create a sound collage using the samples I had taken on Bardon Moor. After loading them all into Ableton, I set about filtering through my samples, removing the ones corrupted by wind noise and ones without many interesting sounds. Once left with my highest quality sounds, I put a low pass filter on all of them at 300hz. This reduced an overwhelming amount of low-end rumble and mud that was making many of these tracks unlistenable. A noise reduction plugin cleaned up the remaining few recordings that were still suffering from excessive background noise.

My plan was to create a rich tapestry which aimed to recreate and represent the soundscape of Gateshead's countryside that I had experienced that day. A backdrop consisting of a combination of bird song recordings set the foundation for the piece. On top of that, I was able to lay many other sounds, including footsteps, bees, sheep, and water features. Many of these sounds have digital effects applied to them. I played with using Paulstretch on some bird calls and sheep bleats which created an almost Jurassic effect. I also used a delay effect which pitch-shifted with each delay iteration. The sound this created was almost sci-fi in nature, as though I was listening to a creature from another planet.

Ensuring there was enough variation in the three-minute piece was more of a challenge as I wasn't able to record all the sounds I had planned to. For example, my cow herd refused to moo for me, even with insistent vocal encouragement from me. Reusing the same sounds in different contexts and with different effects was the solution.

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