Rhythmanalysis (originally published Feb 2017)

Being still and listening are a mindful practice in themselves, and they occur naturally as part of the practice of field recording. But being still and listening are not ‘all there is’ to field recording. There is of course the technical form itself, and the aspects of post-production that inevitably are involved. What I am to suggest is that after and beyond these circles of engagement there is a wider philosophical context in which the practice of field recording can be placed. We have touched on various forms of field recording, each having its own particular angle and associated practices. But beyond the practicalities of these forms of sound work lies a bigger picture. The bigger picture is what can unfold in our awareness. Of course while we are listening and recording there is awareness and we need it to perform the task. But rather like a cognitive post-production, perhaps more importantly comes an awareness afterwards, when we move from the immersive to the reflective. It is this reflection that can lead to an understanding and consciousness of ever widening circles. For this, the paradigm is what Lefebvre called rhythmanalysis. Just as fractal analysis infers the potentially infinite observation of repeating patterns creating larger or more complex shapes, rhythmanalysis can observe and consider then in audible terms, the macro and the micro-scopic aspects of sound and vibration, and patterns, in relation to our lives, and life itself, over time. To put this in context: field recording deals with sound, time, and location. As listeners and field recordists, we are dealing with the cynical energy of sound, which becomes recognisable as characteristic patterns. These patterns themselves may be part of larger temporal cycles. All of this occurs in places. From the cyclical modulation of the frequencies of sound waves we are ‘analysing’ when we are listening, to the patternsof the recognisable sounds we hear, to the patterns of the occurrence of the sounds, to the changes of the occurrences of the sounds in that space over a time, to the changes over history. Cycles, patterns, time, changes, rhythms, and ultimately rhythmanalysis. To clarify by revisiting the examples above: field recording is not simply frequency analysis; it is not simply pattern analysis, nor temporal analysis or historical analysis, but the one aspect that unites and connects all of these is the principle of rhythm. Therefore rhythm for the reasons above; and analysis because we are listening and thinking, we are making a recording but we listen back and we review, we analyse the content and we make comment. Field recording practice is a form of rhythmanalysis.

Putting The Two Together

Our memories fail therefore, and our memories change over time. Sometimes a more ‘exact' reference brings all the details flooding back. Sound has the immersive / emotional quality of bringing us ‘back' to a place or experience. In terms of recording the built environment, spaces change, and cultures change; yet the spaces themselves always offer potential for sound that can only be limited by either technology or the imagination.

Today I went to OVADA in Oxford, to recce the place for a piece. It seemed deathly quiet, uninteresting. I stood still and eventually after waiting long enough I began to hear the sound of an electric socket timer not too far away. With the Roland R-05 handheld recorder I had brought with me, I placed it upside down right next to the timer. I set recording levels to high, and began to record.

You can hear the recording here. I will be making several visits to this place over the next few weeks.

Value In The Passing Of Time

As soon as a sound has been committed to tape, it becomes a historical document of value and interest. It is a ‘record’ of a moment in the history of the world. The process of field recording is like taking a pipette sample of the living breathing vibrating world, from the continuum of life and sound. And any sound sample can become relevant. Rather like the ‘pointless’ photos we protest about being taken at the time, four years later we are so grateful that some kind of imprint exists.

I recently listened to the ambience of empty rooms in the Twin Towers in New York, from a recording in 2000 by Francisco Lopez. It may not have seemed that relevant to capture an ‘empty room ambience’ at the time, but of course listening to that sound in 2017 is now eerie, as that space (and the entire building that contained it) no longer exists. The value of this unproven ambient recording increases directly, from historical events.

The Art Of Being There

There’s always something to capture with field recording. You go out to somewhere you think is quiet and boring.. stand or sit, listen, and then ...something appears. Sound is energy; energy is life - there are very few places you can go where neither of these are present. Even if all you get is ‘silence’ there will be a quality to it, an ambience or a tone that speaks of where or how it was recorded. Or it might be that even the sound of your handling of the recorder at the beginning and end of the sequence that mark as some quote marks ” “ to some ‘silence’? Either way, you capture something: a movement, a gesture, a quality of sound, it is some form of energy transfer, and you capture a moment in time.

JHBB Improvisation: Ableton Live & Akai APC

On 18th May 2016, I did a short talk and performed a piece at the TDE Research Student Conference. The conference was held in the John Henry Brookes Building, at Oxford Brookes, and was for research students in Architecture and other disciplines under the school of Technology and Design for the Built Environment. The Music department is now within this school, which suits me and my interests perfectly!

To give you some context: I had an archive of sounds (field recordings) that I recorded in the John Henry Brookes Building (JHBB) over the Summer of 2014 when involved in the 'Sound and Space' project, and I wanted to 'perform' the sounds live in an improvisatory way, in the building itself. Using Ableton Live 9 and a hardware controller, I was able to improvise a ten minute piece based on and using, field recordings taken in the JHBB.

In my mind, I wanted to be using an Ableton Push controller, with its 64 pads and potential to manipulate audio; but I hadn't one at that point and so instead I used my travel studio: the Akai APC Key25. This I have taken on tours with me and had great times making music in hotel rooms and on the bus. It allows me to play music by triggering clips, scenes, and also to mute, solo, mix, and manipulate audio effects and software parameters by hand without using a mouse. It also has tiny keyboard and fits in a bag.

DJ the pace: detailing the Frideswide Square sound map

The main drive of the talk was about how collecting sounds in the built environment allows us to play with 'place' and 'space', and (using Bourriaud's Post Production as a context) how you can essentially 'DJ' the place. I gave examples of sound maps online, and how when you can mix two sounds together at the same time you create something new. This concept was also linked loosely to Italio Calvino’s Invisible Cities

My piece was improvised, and ‘open’. I like the idea that there is no monolithic version of it. I like also this kind of democracy of (a) place, discovered and uncovered through sound, and I want to play with this more in giving people the opportunity to DJ a location sonically - creating their own version and discovering new interpretations of place as they go.

Performing the sounds of the JHBB

As you can see I had the session projected up behind me, so the performance could be viewed as happening in real time! 

Building Site Slice

Monday, 1 August 2016

Here’s something I did using Ableton Push 2

In Ableton as with many DAWs you can ‘slice’ a sample into many different parts, creating a palette of sounds from which new sounds and patterns can be created. Very often people use intros to a pre-existing track, or the entire song, even. For this one I used a field recording: this means sounds recorded outside of a studio, in the place where the sounds ‘naturally’ occur.

I tend to find myself making field recordings around building sites (!). This one I recorded on 29th Sept 2011, I think I was in Summertown in Oxford. 

Sliced up into Ableton, and using the Push 2 controller, I’m able to re-imagine the sounds in rhythmic and harmonic ways. I made this track in minutes, then went back to pick up and tweak the arrangement. It’s rough, but you can see here how you can take a general field recording of construction and turn it into a musical piece. I haven’t gone overboard with either the quantisation or the melodic content, instead just content to noodle with the sounds I had.

The original field recording was about 30 seconds but sliced up and playing around with the sections I have made a 3 minute piece. Listen to the sliced version before the original, it’s more interesting that way!

Original field recording:

"Space differs from place, as place connects sociality to spatiality in everyday life." (Lefebvre)

From 'Invisible Cities' by Italo Calvino:

“As this wave from memories flows in, the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands. A description of [the city] as it is today should contain all [the city's] past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.”

"Space is a vital part of the battle for control and surveillance of individuals, but it is a battle and not a question of domination."

Foucault: Space, Knowledge and Power

Frideswide Square Sound Map

Field recording is a way of questioning space, and a way of investigating some of what Foucault reveals above.

With a modern day WAV recorder, the power to record and capture sounds is literally in the hands of the individual. When we investigate with recorders the world in which we exist, we are able to see quite clearly the different kinds of life that are going on in the shared spaces, and the quality of life we are all living differently individually, and also as a whole.
Power, and the control of sound in the form of surveillance are often ideas that are associated with the State. Yet field recording can become a form of surveillance that can be turned back onto society - questioning it itself.

Below is a sound map that I made in 2010. I visited the site on many occasions over 5-6 months and made recordings with hand-held recorders, contact microphones, mechanically filtered recordings, submerged recorders; and I also recorded electromagnetic activity in this area.

Below here is a 'play list' of the sounds in the sound map. Clicking on the sounds in the playlist means that you can make a mix between the locations in the map above, and the sounds below.

Why: 'Architecture and Music'?

The effect of architecture on sound is one that has shaped the development of music itself. Music was and has been composed for specific spaces, and each space has its own acoustic properties. This has been both a conscious, and an unconscious development, and has involved pre-existing as well as constructed spaces.

In a very direct example of the relationship between styles of music and the spaces in which they are heard, David Byrne points out how the drums and chanting of African village songs fit perfectly in an outdoor open space, whereas the melismatic meanderings of Gothic choral music only really work in the acoustic reverb chamber of a stone cathedral. The space shapes the style of music and the delivery of its content; the culture then works within that, but only secondarily. When music evolved from religious worship and began to be recognised as an art form in itself, the composer wrote for the space in which it would be heard simply because that would be the only place that it would be heard.

Yet curiously before even this, natural spaces had a hand in shaping what would even become to be known as 'music'. According to many in the field of acoustic archeology (aka: 'archaeoacoustics'), before even a conscious collaboration between sound and space: natural design played a part in the shaping of ritual and culture that led to musical practice. The echoing, reverberant cave spaces where tribes gathered for shelter and then socially, had acoustic properties that inspired and encouraged tribal rituals, and hence allowed an emerging culture to develop. Cave painting and visual cave art are often found in cave spaces where unique acoustic properties abound - often relating to the image itself: for example a bird image in a place where there is a flutter echo effect.

Therefore since the dawn of civilisation, the space, the sound, and of course the technology facilitating architecture have always been inextricably linked.

What really is 'the sound of the streets'..?

“As this wave from memories flows in, the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands. A description of [the city] as it is today should contain all [the city's] past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.” - Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities.

All you need to do is start, and countless revelations lie on the other side of a sensory awakening that can be gained from  the simple practice of - listening. 

From that point on, the world will reveal itself to you in scrolls, in artefacts, in histories and symphonies of sound that are ever unfolding in this constantly living, changing universe - a universe that always offers a point of contact through awareness.

'Put The Needle On The Record' (2012)

Part of the portfolio for my Master's degree (2012).

St Barnabas Sound Map 03 (Year 1)

The Year 1 class at St Barnabas were given a talk about active listening, and the difference between active and passive listening.

They were then shown a Sound Map of the World in which you can hear recorded sounds from around the globe. We listened to sounds (recordings) from various places in the world, and the pupils described what they could hear. Lastly, the pupils were then sent out in small groups to capture sounds with hand-held recording devices, with the idea of collecting material for their own Sound Map of St Barnabas School.

Click on the map pointers to hear where the sounds were recorded. Or play from the SoundCloud list below.

From looking at frogs, listening to taps, and jumping off steps the children seemed to be lost in a world of sound...I think the railings are my favourite!




Here are the sounds in a SoundCloud list:

"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