Tag: traffic

OX-LDN return – field / materiality

On the Oxford Tube after the exhibition and having read Manfred Werder’s extracted notes Field [http://manfred-werder-archives.blogspot.co.uk/] the bus driver’s voice commanded me in its comforting bassy tone to sit back and enjoy the sound of his voice over the deeply idling engine.

[mejsaudio src=”http://www.sound-diaries.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/1044-bass-driver-intro-a.mp3″]
1044 bass driver intro

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1046 begin journey

[mejsaudio src=”http://www.sound-diaries.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/1047-slow-acceleration-a.mp3″]
1047 slow acceleration

In listening to the rise and fall of the bass sound coming from the engine through the floor I became aware of the contrasting high rattle of the internal fittings and furniture. I then realised there was more enveloping background present in the form of a large wide hollow body of sound that felt like it was related to the internal air pressure of the bus and which seemed to be mixed with the sound of the constant flow of air moving past the external skin of the bus – or the other way round depending on how you look at it.

[mejsaudio src=”http://www.sound-diaries.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/1049-busair-fittings-traffic-a.mp3″]
1049 bus air fittings traffic

Maybe it was less appropriate to think of the bus as an object causing sound than to think of a bus-situation of complex materiality…

…while there is such a thing as the bus travelling along the motorway there are also interrelated and constantly fluxing fields around [and within?] both the bus and me… In listening to the random flow of quiet quick thin sounds of individual cars passing in the opposite direction 20m away, each making its own v light whipped wishing noise it was clear that the situation changed significantly with only small changes to the position of listening particularly in relation to the windscreen.

[mejsaudio src=”http://www.sound-diaries.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/1050-traffic-space.mp3″]
1050 traffic space

This post is by Toby O’Connor, who participated in the Documenting Sound workshop held at Audiograft 2012 by Felicity Ford and Valeria Merlini

00.54 …at Gloucester Green

On a recent visit to Berlin to perform it pays my way and it corrodes my soul with Stephen Cornford at LEAP, I made these recordings. Whenever I could I stopped and recorded my situation from the raucous queue outside a nightclub in Oxford to the escalators at Stansted and a Mexican dinner in Berlin. The recordings were made using an Edirol R-09HR.

Extra context here.

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00.54 …at Gloucester Green

Berlin Sound Diary

At Audiograft last year, Paul Whitty and Stephen Cornford performed a piece at Modern Art Oxford entitled it pays my way and it corrodes my soul. This piece utilises a reel-to-reel tape-player, the expected role of which is subverted and transformed throughout the performance. The audience do not hear recorded sounds being played back through it – as is its anticipated function – instead, we hear the sounds of the machine itself as it is dismantled:

A reel-to-reel tape recorder is switched on and it’s mechanism amplified with a variety of microphones while it is taken to pieces. The sounds produced are then fed through an array of pedals: the machine’s belts, gears, switches and casing becoming an instrument subjected to a live audio autopsy. The piece was premiered at the Audiograft Festival at Modern Art Oxford in February 2011 and has since been performed at The Horse Hospital, London and LEAP, Berlin.

– http://scrawn.co.uk/19.html

During the recent trip to Berlin to perform the work, Paul produced a Sound Diary documenting the whole journey from Oxford to LEAP and home again:

On a recent visit to Berlin to perform it pays my way and it corrodes my soul with Stephen Cornford at LEAP, I made these recordings. Whenever I could I stopped and recorded my situation from the raucous queue outside a nightclub in Oxford to the escalators at Stansted and a Mexican dinner in Berlin. The recordings were made using an Edirol R-09HR.

The resulting collection of recordings contextualises the performance within the sounds and stories of the world, blurring the distinctions between life and art, and revealing the sequences of sounds which precede and follow the designated cultural experience. As the role of the tape-player is subverted in the performance itself, so is the role of documentation in Paul Whitty’s resulting sonic work. Rather than existing merely to evidence the performance of it pays my way and it corrodes my soul at LEAP, the Berlin Sound Diary becomes a piece in its own right, extending the function of documentation in the same way that the performance extends the sonic and imaginative possibilities of an old reel-to-reel tape player.

Paul’s Berlin Sound Diary will be released day by day here, throughout January, as we consider the role of the Sound Diary and Sonic Documentation in the run up to this year’s Audiograft Festival at Oxford Brookes.

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00.15 …at the corner of Speedwell Street and St. Aldates

22nd December

From the 1st – 24th December, we will reveal 24 seconds of sound from a warmer place here on the sound-diaries blog, taken from either Paul Whitty or Felicity Ford’s collections of holiday recordings.

Today’s sound features the sounds of birds and traffic in the parking area at an Airboat tour centre in the Everglades, Florida, USA. Recorded by Felicity Ford.

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