"The creative gesture or intention of recording provides a result, a document, certainly from which seemingly endless possibilities stream."

St Barnabas Sound Map 02 (Year 5)

Year 5 at St Barnabas took their turn at recording and mapping sounds in their school towards the end of 2013. Many took to the idea of an 'archive' in rather touching ways, leaving spoken testaments to their friends and introducing spaces and people vocally when they were in charge of the microphone. Although these poignant eulogies will be archived as part of the whole project, most of the intentionally narrated spoken aspects have been left out, because initially the idea is that all sounds are 'secret' (i.e. we don't know who the recordist is..), and that we are listening to the natural ambience, and naturally occurring sounds...



You can also listen to the sounds (on their own or mixed with the locations above) in the SoundCloud list below...

Working on...

What is music when it is beyond 'professional', marketable, and industrial reach? How can we discover more about ourselves, and our surroundings, through sound, and the simple act of field recording? How many people realise that the ability to create, rather than simply consume music, is literally in their hands (or head)?

St Barnabas Sound Map 01

Six months ago I won a small grant from the Student Community Grant to operate a project called ‘Secret Sound’. This project sought to archive sounds from all over Oxfordshire by getting the local population to submit audio clips from their ‘acoustic territory’, or daily routine. What struck me as I sought to promote this ideal, was how difficult it was to get people to think in terms of sound: as communication of identity, of personality, of history. One of the aspects of the project was to involve schools in documenting sounds from their areas.  I decided to start at this level, in the hope that some of these principles could be understood.

Using the money from the Student Community Fund, I bought four Zoom H1 wav recorders, and some basic windshields. I wrote out a lesson plan based around two concepts: listening and recording, with special reference towards doing the two of these in various locations. The main idea was to get children into the idea of listening as a skill and as a creative (and practical) tool and act, rather than as something of a 'passive' sense. Also, they would be involved in creating something: a recording, a sound document. These recordings would later form a sound map – a process which would involve them with issues of geography, citizenship, creativity, identity, and of environmental awareness.

The session ran in the following way: after a brief talk about listening, and a few brief concept of recording, the class was split up into four groups. Each group was given a WAV recorder, and was then to go to different locations in search of an acoustic space, or a specific sound, which they would record. Later on we would have to work out where they had been, or what sound they had found and ‘captured’.

What was noticeable from my group and the other groups, was that the children were highly motivated to create and find their own sounds. As well as capturing the passive ambience of a location, the children were actively interested in ‘playing’ a location; the objects, the space, the acoustic properties relevant to it. During this part the groups worked as a team in choosing a location, or in selecting a sound from the location to record. They also worked together in ‘performing’ aspects of the location (for example multiple fingers tapping on a hollow metal pole in the school kitchen area, or activating the space in the school hall by calling out “ECHO, ECHO!” as they danced around in a circle).

When we listened back, the children were extremely keen to play their own sounds, as well as hearing and deciphering everyone else’s. Lastly I re-capped on what we’d done, on how they had managed to deduce all information from the sound only, and how listening in this way creates a unique imagery of its own, potentially more interesting than video footage, or other forms of visual documentation. The whole session lasted an hour and a half. Later, I edited a selection of the sounds and put them into the  sound map above.

When testing the site, I was pleasantly surprised at how ‘alive’ the map sounds. That is down to the children themselves: their invention, their imagination, their ability to express so clearly. In times of intense textual communication and networking, and an overly–stimulated visual cortex, we really can express so much about ourselves, our lives, our preoccupations, simply with sound. 




The sound map is above (click on the location pointers for sounds) and the sounds are as a list below


St Barnabas' Sound Map 01 by Secret Sound

Frideswide Square Sound Map : 'How To Exhaust A Place'...

What is the chord of a place? It may be unanswerable, but in investigating this question, I made various field recordings on repeated visits to a particular location: a traffic 'island' called Frideswide Square, in Oxford.

Click on a red map locator below to launch a sound file.



You can mix the sounds and 'play' the location using the red map locators above, and the Soundcloud list below...
Explore the map locators and their associated sound files above, then try mixing one of the sounds above, with one from the SoundCloud list below...

Frideswide Square: Sound Map by Laurence Colbert

If you are a composer, why make a sound map? It seems so passive, so un-related to music and composition. But the planning, the recording, the editing, the interacting with the site, and the sharing of the results in a world-wide medium, are just examples of a very pro-active process. And ultimately in my choices of location, objects, and surfaces to record, I am 'composing' my own sound image of a particular site. For example: I chose also to include some of the electromagnetic topography of the site, certain areas 'underneath' the site, resonant surfaces within the site, and physical 'movements' and gestures specific to the site itself.

New technology allows for new forms of composition. Satellite imaging, the increasing integration of sound into the Internet, and ever developing computer technology bring us closer to a simulacrum or hyper-reality of the world we currently live in. Right now, it is still all up for grabs. I made this sound map, to arrange recordings in a logical and relevant fashion. If these were all on a CD one might hear them in a certain way; but in making a sound map, one can move around the location itself, and explore it on the way that one wants to. You can also mix your own version using different aspects captured. It is a sound diary of the time I spent documenting this place, but also mapped and documented as movement and investigation around a particular area.

Music! Architecture!

What if we made music out of modules, phrases, in an open-ended fashion, rather than in a 'through-composed', 'written' sense? I made six such modules for xylophone, vibraphone and piano, based on the first few drum-rudiments; the idea being that one unit lasts for one bar, the next lasts for two, the third takes three bars to 'resolve', and so on up until a six-bar pattern. Each unit is multi-purpose, perhaps shifting in role from providing accompaniment to supporting the composition structurally.

Each player had a card with their part, and these instructions:

• When playing: fade in, and fade out sections.

• Inside of these fades, repeat your section for at least a minute.

• While playing, allow timbres to shift in slow curves by moving your sticks around on the playing surface of your instrument, and vary dynamics slowly. The piano may use pedals for this effect.

• After fading out there can be a brief pause before beginning a new section.

• If returning to a section for the second time in a performance you may play

up or down the octave.

(Fig. 1: Early versions of 'score-cards')

Our lives are shaped by architecture; and because the architecture of buildings reflect the aspirations of a society, I was curious to apply such 'constructivist' aspirations to music. I say 'constructivist' because I always feel that if a building is made with people in mind, it succeeds; it succeeds if people maintain a use for it, so if I was to make anything then it would have to be with this in mind. The way I see it, we are currently using modular, flexible methods of construction to create multi-purpose buildings- hence the above.

There's also a link to a (better sounding) ten-minute version recorded at OCM Open, The North Wall, 27/03/2010 here, with a relevant review here

A Musical Education Part II

So I turn up at Robin’s house: late, with a scrap of paper and a pen that doesn’t work. We’re due to play these songs in about half an hour, so we’d ‘better do some preparation'. Fine chance of that now. Sadly there’s a reason to play them: Alex Chilton died this week, and (why does this happen, but it always does) the genius of an artist’s oeuvre is reminded; the songs flag up in our collective memory. As do the hairs on the back of my neck when Robin blasts Radio City out of the stereo. I feel as though I’m coming face to face with a long lost child: I’ve known these songs deep in my heart, but it’s the features and the detail I need to connect with, to re-discover.

I shut my eyes and luxuriate in the sounds: it’s coming back; the colours, the melodies and the harmonic suspensions reactivate cells in my body that kept the echo from years ago. I’m lost, swaying to the thumping pulse of ‘Back of a Car’, letting the fills roll over me before they collide with ever-new chords that explode with fresh summer air. I’m on the sofa again, though; I haven’t written anything down but a triplet, and we’re playing in twenty minutes! It is a bit like being speechless, or being granted an audience with God… how could I write something like this down? It is utter brilliance! A few more token musical scribbles but really I just want to sit here and remember, and there will be time for that yet, but right now the gear has been loaded out, and time is up. We tumble out of the house laughing, stunned at how musically impeccable the members of the band were, each of us privately nervous about our undertaking.

For a first gig with no rehearsal we do ok; the songs themselves rise up as groggy spectres in the room, witnessed by a few bemused locals and foreign students. But they will awake fully again; and it’s their time to be reborn. Summer, with all its promise is just around the corner; Alex Chilton may be dead, but long live Big Star. This music is important- let it in.