Listen to it here.

A soundscape inspired by my memories of living in the small town of Rota, in the southern tip of Spain. It is mixture of the sounds that come back when I see pictures of the place, more than anything it's just seeing those sidewalks (see picture) that reminds me of this lively little town.

    I wanted to capture all of the memories I had and swirl them together, but still maintain the coherence of a real space (everything is connected/placed as it may have been had this been a real scene). And so time is compressed into one busy day (or minute), a busier one than you would perhaps experience had you been there, but the ambience keeps the sonic space away from the surreal.
    The first problem I realized was getting lots of authentic Spanish conversation - in the province of Andalucia (southern Spain), people have distinct accents, and even a certain manner - very laid back. I had to settle for excerpts of programming on Univision and Galavision to provide Spanish conversation. I recorded 4 hours of footage from the two channels, and with the VCR connected directly to my computer culled it to the most usable clips. So, if you know Spanish the dialogues (and accents) may seem somewhat strange, coming from soap operas and talk shows. I even considered reversing or overlapping or somehow distorting the voices so that the would be unintelligible to any person, as they were to myself when I heard them originally. But, I ultimately decided to leave them intact, as otherwise the piece would become nightmarish or trippy, and these are not feelings that return to me when I recall this place.
    The ambience and certain background sounds (soccer ball kicking) are recorded directly into my computer via a long cord and a microphone (I lead it out the window where I recorded outside on my balcony. Here is a helpful hint when recording directly into a computer, turn off the monitor! It was causing noise in the line, and it took me a while to find the source.
    The guitar was a tough decision- record with mic or directly plug into the computer? I decided to plug it in (it is a classical guitar with a pickup, Tacoma CC10E2) as it was much easier to get good consistent levels this way, and had much less noise. However, I lost some of the tone that could only get picked up by a mike, the pickup having a brighter, much less woody and resonant sound.
    Other sounds (especially animals and vehicles) were picked up by a thorough scanning of the internet. I made sure to clean them all up as much as possible with Sound Forge before I even imported them into ProTools, which made everything flow smoothly in playback.
    In the final mix I place the sounds at odds with eachother at diverse places in the stereo axis - and most everything pans, at least subtly. The most important part, however, to making the sounds seem at home in this created place, was letting their volume levels ebb and flow. That is, each one came in and fluctuated, reaching it's peak at one point before it disappeared. This gives the allusion of the sources moving, things coming inbetween listener and source to block the sound, or perhaps sound only reaching the listener when the wind shifts in a certain direction.

Listen to it here.

   Very abstract listening, yes. As proposed by Russolo and Cowell in Noise Water Meat, I mean to support the thesis that sound and noise are one and the same. The beginning of this piece is just to set the stage for what we're talking about, what is 'music/sound' and 'noise' and when does this happen? There are three main arguments that I use to support this thesis within this piece.
   The first is a song played on my guitar in two different versions, overlayed. The odd picking sounds come from myself playing a song with the strings dampened, so only the resident/background noises are picked up: the intended sounds that would be normally expected are absent. The sound overlayed is my playing the exact same song again, only the way one would expect to hear it, with intended sounds strongest. I wish I could record the song without resident/background sounds, and then we would see if it still sounded "full."
   The second idea to come across has to do with the "musicality" or the purity of the waveform. Does this really have to do with the difference between noise and sound? Obviously the musical instruments aren't as pure sounding as the computer generated tones, but the added noise makes them more pleasing to our ear. But, even then, the computer generated tones are still not understood perfectly, because our bodies (ears here), minds, and the world around us are full of imperfections.
   Lastly, this is an experiment with the line, and emphasizing the raw physicality of sound. It is a pressure wave. The 'line' is simply our cartesian way of visualizing this phenomena. And so both 'sounds' and 'noises' are made of exactly the same thing, are the same thing, and it's only context that lets us differentiate. Context is what it's all about.

Listen to it here.

   This is a sound piece based upon a comic that I'm writing for another class. It is based upon a central character who through the story experiences or believes in 3 different 'layers' or types of reality. It's hard to explain, but at first he is living at the material level, concerning himself with nothing but work and the day to day life. He has a dream/nightmare, though, in which he chastises himself about ignoring the social realities of the world: hunger, war, disease.... He then slip into depression, only to come out of it realizing the 'absolute' reality of the world, that he is alive, that the sky is blue, that his feet are under him, for better or for worse. The comic, however, is not finished yet, so this piece will have to stand alone with only my explanation as a guide, I guess....