This week as a class we learned about and discussed key practices involved in sound art. We spoke about Musique Concrète, which is the process of composing music using recorded sounds as raw material. These sounds are then often modified and effected through signal processing and tape technologies.

My task for this post was to identify sounds I come across everyday that contain certain sonic qualities such as rhythm, texture and pitch.

Since I live above a train track, I figured that the sound of trains shooting past was a pretty big theme in my life. I mainly identified rhythm as a key quality of this sound; the trains run over weaker/louder points of the track over and over again creating a pretty regular beat over the backdrop of the drone of the train itself. (I couldn’t get a recording of the trains at the point of writing this post).

Maintaining the same theme of sounds coming from below, outside my window, I heard the sounds of people from the smoking area late at night. One of the main qualities I identified from this sound was pitch, and the erratic change of pitch. Depending on the person, or the amount of people talking, or the subject being spoken about, the pitch would be vastly different.

Another quality that I identified was melody and cadence. Whilst on the underground, before every stop, or at the beginning of the line etc, the automated speaker announcing the destination interested me. After listening for a while, I picked up on certain cadences that are utilised. After some brief research, I found this article by the New York Times from 1995, writer unknown, that explains how ‘only the announcer can make sure that the messages are delivered at a cadence that can be understood by a diverse patronage’, not particularly relevant but quite interesting, it explains why announcers deliver messages using certain cadences or specific rhythmic patterns.