pulses

Our environment is full of quasi-musical situations. Those situations can serve as a vast resource for an electroacoustic composition. For example: Germany's traffic lights encode their state into different kinds of repetitive clicks. So if one stands at an intersection with lots of traffic lights one can hear their clicks coming from different directions and distances. Depending on the listener's vantage point the mixture of those clicks can appear as spatial cross rhythms, and if the listener moves the perceived rhythms will change, as well. In pulses I recorded those clicks and recreated an orchestrated, abstracted version of this situation. Those recordings served as one of the foundation stones of the piece. The other one stemmed from failed attempts to record things.While capturing sounds in the open field lots of strange things can happen – especially with the technology involved. So I went out to attempt to record the peace of England's northern landscapes. Unfortunately, the microphone connector broke during the recording, superimposing a wonderful aggressive noise over the "silence" of the environment. Back in the studio I analysed the behaviour and context of that noise to be able to introduce it to other, cleanly recorded sounds. And consequently I arrived at two additional contrasting ideas to base my piece on: balancing and superimposing noise against silence.