We’ve passed from Record Store Day to Earth Day – and here’s the perfect segue. Having ventured into the woods to find a music release, now we can hear trees transformed, by way of sampling, into catchy rhythms. Our friend Diego Stocco, that evergreen source of creative timbres, now makes everything from trees to beans into sounds that are subtle and complex, full of personality and uniquely tied to their origin materials. There’s no real violence done to nature, either; you can make all of these noises with little more force than a small thundershower.

Remarkably, the video – shot as a promotional for Burt’s Bees – is all real-time. After-the-fact sampling manipulation is itself a fun activity, but there’s none of that business here; this is all improvisation, not editing or effects.

And that brings us to the real message of what Diego Stocco can do. Microphones matter, yes, but the real expertise here is not mic technique; it’s listening. Diego comes up with this great material because he’s had a lot of practice listening to the world around him. As the skill of his listening improves, so do his sounds, as though the planet unfolds new possibilities. (In fact, even the question of technical experience also comes down to the same idea: you’ll get better at mic selection and placement with more experimentation and listening closely to the results.)

Other examples he’s released in the past months drive that point home. In “Improv on a Plate,” the composer and sound designer plays a plate as though it’s an instrument.

I was about to cut a chocolate cake and when I moved the plate on the countertop I noticed a very interesting sound.
One side of the plate was free to vibrate because the tiles were not perfectly even, so by applying pressure with one finger and tapping it with another I was able to create some tonal beats.
I hope you’ll enjoy it!
The recording setup was very simple, Røde NT5, Apogee ONE, Pro Tools 9.

At a recent workshop at Berklee, Diego gave this advice to students explicitly: listen. (The suggestion comes across in a way that to me resonates with the teachings of Zen Buddhism – and, indeed, the teachings of just about all teachers in all disciplines. Observation is essential.)

He illustrated that point with a case study: a taxicab with a funny trunk can be the beginnings of a piece of music.

One of the things that I talked about during my sound design lecture at Berklee http://bit.ly/y89Wtr was to listen to the world around you all the time.

There are many reasons, there could be something interesting happening from a sonic standpoint, you could enrich your sound vocabulary by building references, and most of the time you can create something useful out of that recorded material.

On my way back home, I took a cab from the airport, and I noticed that there was a strange chirping noise coming from the trunk. Of course, I recorded it right away : )
I took that sound, did some work on it and created this short sound designed piece.
You’ll hear the dry sound first, and then the sound designed version, enjoy!

I can think of no better way to celebrate Earth Day than with that reflection: listening to your environment, “organic” and man-made, and the world all around you will help you discover possibilities you’ve missed. That’s not just sound design: it’s a way of (better) life. Happy Earth Day; hope you’ve all had a good weekend.

http://diegostocco.com/

For more hot mic-on-tree action this Earth Day, here’s the 2009 video Music from a Tree:

Where do you get your ideas? Sometimes, it can be a challenge just to start a track, or can simply feel a bit, well, lonely. Finding fellow music makers can solve that. Artists gathering around SoundCloud and online ambient music chronicle Disquiet work together, with inspiration from recording ice to ancient found samples of music and spoken word. Disquiet itself has challenged artists with Instagram photos and the city of Lisbon. The results are imaginative, varied, superb music. And they’ve been surprisingly popular, earning lots of ears and inspiring still more music.

Now, given the Instagram sale for US$1 billion, I would value the free compilation inspired by its photo sharing at least a couple of million dollars. Finding a welcoming community both to spur on new musical ideas and share the results? Priceless.

And, okay, while perhaps they haven’t netted any massive Facebook buyouts, the past months have proven that ideas like this can motivate music makers and listeners alike.

The Disquiet Junto, started by Disquiet and its editor, Marc Weidenbaum, describes itself as “a collaborative music-making space in which restraints are used as a springboard for creativity.” New projects are announced on Thursday, and then you have until the following Monday just before midnight to upload tracks. In just fifteen weeks, that’s inspired some 700 tracks – not bad, especially considering ambient music, lovely as it is, is hardly considered a hot commodity as genres go. (Non-ambient submissions are welcome, too, so long as they fit the brief.)

This week’s challenge, for instance, due Monday the 23rd of April, starts with samples of a piece of sandpaper and a pair of dice. The challenge: make one the foreground, and one the background. (The samples came from free sharing site freesound.org.) Previous challenges including Shostakovich and old rural music, bird song, a spoken word Benjamin Franklin autobiography, and old Edison cylinders as source material, and challenges like working from recordings of ice in a glass.

Weidenbaum has also been assembling some lovely compilations. The most recent “remixes” the city of Lisbon, entitled LX(RMX). Marc explains:

It’s 16 tracks, two each by eight musicians — each musician recording one under a pseudonym, and one under their own name, all exploring the sounds of urban Lisbon:

http://disquiet.com/2012/02/14/lxrmx-lisbon-remixed/

The 17th track is the source material.

Here’s what the resulting tracks sound like:

A separate compilation from the end of last year explored the notion of using photos on Instagram as source material. In two separate conversations, artists told me recently they felt that we lived in a “visual” culture, one in which the image was more important than sound. I’m still not convinced that’s true, or even how this oft-repeated statement is evaluated. But on the other hand, finding visual inspiration for music is a compelling exercise, a change to feed one part of the mind with stimulus from another.

Marc reflected on the project when I spoke with him in January – long before Instagram became part of business history, and when the Junto group was just starting:

The first week of release of Instagr/am/bient was much more intense than I had expected — intense in terms of how quickly it garnered an audience. The first week it averaged over 2,000 listens per day, not counting downloads (which I posted over on Archive.org). I had hopes that the mix of visuals and sound would be of broader interest than some of this music (drones, abstractions, extended phonography) might be on its lonesome. Apparently that proved to be the case. Clearly, tying it to a familiar software (Instagram) helped ground people’s imaginations, as of course did the visuals. I think there’s a lesson in that. The correlation also functioned thematically: not just how the music was inspired by the photos, but how Instagram images and ambient music both involve, in their own ways, filters/processes that alter existing documents (photographs in one case, often field recordings in another).

It was interesting as well how the musicians acted on their assignments. Each of the 25 sent to me an Instagram photo they had taken. I then gave thought as to how to disperse them, sometimes assigning one to a musician whose work I thought it shared an aesthetic with, sometimes to a musician for whom I thought the image would provide a creative
challenge. For example, I gave the image to Evan Cordes that showed the wheel of an office chair against floorboards. To my eye, the lines of the floorboards resembled sheet music, and indeed when I later discussed the project with Cordes he confirmed that he had interpreted it as a graphic score.

This project differed from past Disquiet.com projects in that it was looser. The assignments were fully conscious, but in the end one has less overall control over something when 25 geographically dispersed musicians working from 25 different source subjects are involved, versus when a dozen musicians are involved. The next major Disquiet.com project is very controlled, just eight musicians, all with a very specific assignment. It should be out in a few weeks.

The relative openness of the Instagr/am/bient project inspired me to push the idea a step further. So, I created a Soundcloud group for communal sound experiments, which launched today. It is called Disquiet-Junto. It already has 40 members, which is great. The idea is that I come up with a sound/music assignment and post the idea on a Friday, and then Monday by midnight the groups’ members post their recordings in response to the assignment. Already there are a half dozen tracks based on the first assignment, which is to make music from the sound of ice in a glass.

The aftermath of the Instagram compilation is itself a fascinating story. The compilation captured the imagination of writers well outside the world of music. But most tellingly, you can read how the group of 25 musicians worked to translate what they saw into sounds of their own creation – whether in the microcosm of technical details (gear used and such) or bigger ideas of how to work between the visual and aural media. Their reactions are sometimes formal, sometimes emotional, intuitive, or fanciful.

Evan Cordes even posted video of his Pd patch, ticking away:

Hilobrow has this revelatory review:

Imagine receiving a postcard in the mail. Ok, back up: remember the mail? Remember postcards?

Right, now imagine them. On one side, an image: a faraway place, an iconic sign, people smiling, a sunset. Perhaps someone has even scribbled on it, adding their own moustaches, thought bubbles, or other postal graffiti. “Having a wonderful time,” it inevitably says, “wish you were here.”

Or, does it? Turning it over, ostensibly to read, you find instead that it — sings.

But, Instagram hype aside, consider what this could mean for finding inspiration anywhere, for reinvigorating your musical process. Actually, don’t think about it too long – just go do it.

You can check out the Juno group:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto

And read up on the two curated compilations – each released under a Creative Commons license:

LX(RMX) / LISBON REMIXED

INSTAGR/AM/BIENT: 25 SONIC POSTCARDS

http://disquiet.com

Note, too, that the SoundCloud Meetup Day is on the 17th of May. I expect to be keeping tuned into what’s happening in Berlin and involved in something in London, but wherever you are in the world, I’d love to hear what ideas you have for exchanging sound, and if you’ll be doing something to celebrate if you’re a SoundCloud user.

SoundCloud Global Meetup Day May 17th: Get Involved!

“Timelapse” usually refers to the process of sampling small bits of video or film and piecing them together to form a sped-up version of reality. (Actually, that’s not entirely accurate. Any recording involves sampling small bits of time. Timelapse simply plays back those samples at a rate faster than reality, so that instead of playing back film frames recorded at 30 frames per second at a playback speed of 30 frames per second, you play back film recorded at one frame every ten minutes at 30 frames per second, for example.)

What if you made a timelapse of sound, and not simply image? Reader Andrew Spitz did that, building a sound-sampling app in visual development tool Max/MSP. He’s made the resulting tool available to anyone using Mac or Windows, for free, so you can try it yourself. In the demo video, what you get is a stuttering, rhythmic montage of found sound. But change the material or setting, and perhaps you can get very different results.

I love the word he’s using here: “phonography.”

phonoLapse is a free desktop app for Mac and Windows that lets you create audio time-lapses. For the 2010 Enterferenze New Art Festival I put together a little Time Lapse Phonography piece that followed me over the course of 24 hours (check the video below). I have been receiving emails from people wanting to create their own, and decided to work on a standalone version so you too can create some time-lapse phonography .

Grab it yourself:
phonoLapse {+ software} [sound+design]

By the way, Andrew is responsible for one of my other favorite recent projects:
Voice Messages Become 3D Paper Waveform Sculptures: Paper Note

Through the eyes of satellites, roving Google trucks, aerial imagery, and more, we have plenty of eyes on our planet. But what does it sound like here on Earth?

In a Web application and accompanying art installation, the world turns as it echoes sounds recorded around the world on Creative Commons-licensed site Freesound.org. It’s stunning to hear our world’s acoustic diversity – in some strange way, even more than seeing it, in that sounds can instantly give you a sense of place and time. You can load a version on your browser or on the iPad; then, from the world’s cities, listen as sounds mix automatically from one locale to another in an ambient sound score.

Browser Version (animates a bit slow for me, but works)
iPad World Sound Mix app [free | iTunes]
(via Hermann Helmholtz – great tip!)

The basic notion is something we see repeated regularly, even with this visualization; this is a fantasy those of us who work in sound routinely entertain. But it’s doubly worth mentioning, in that it’s an excuse to mention the lovely Japanese label/artist/laboratory 43d.

43d engages sound through a variety of tools. In the 43d laboratory, the spinning Earth interface finds its way into an installation (video below), iPad app, and browser app, as workshops send participants into the field to listen to their environment and gather more sounds. Such exercises have an added bonus for us electronic musicians, of course, as collected sounds can easily become the raw materials of music in any genre through the wonderful alchemy of our machines.

http://labs.43d.jp/

The installation and sound mix project:

“World Sound Mix for BankART LIFE3″ is a sound visual installation, generating new soundscape around the world. This work continues mixing the sounds at selected two points somewhere in the world from the database of huge quantities of environment sounds and generating new soundscape.

For this exhibition, we set up a magic box that resonates mixed soundscape in Sapporo and somewhere in the world. During the exhibition, a globe in the box keeps turning and resonating sounds in real time.

About sounds data:
World Sound Mix is based on a sound database from Freesound project, its sounds have been recorded and gathered by sound hunters around the world. The use of sound data is under the CreativeCommons Sampling+ 1.0 License. By the username and “freesound sound ID” shown on the globe, listener can refer to original content.

http://www.43d.jp/wsm2011/

Freesound.org, a terrific source of sounds:

http://www.freesound.org/

But what I especially like about all of this is that the environmental sounds don’t have to exist in a vacuum. 43d is also an ambient music label, the work of artist Junichi Oguro:

A sound artist who widens the realm of music. Born in Sapporo in 1974.
He started to compose music since his childhood, and received a grand prize at a national contest. In 2006 he visited Berlin for making music in various fields from commercial music for TV spots to sound space design in various areas of Europe. He also showcases sound art pieces in the realm of the contemporary art. He manages an ambient label “43d” which was established for creating leading edge sounds.

The just-released “Unfield” is breathtaking, turning effortlessly from rough-shod digital glitches to icy-sweet ballads and intimate, gorgeous vocals by Malloy Nagasawa. It combines custom software and control with more conventional recording techniques:

http://www.43d.jp/releases/

Have a listen:

Hope to hear more from this whole project.
43d.jpg

The content we watch on the Internet is, ultimately, just data. We view that data in fairly narrow, conventional ways, but there’s no reason that has to be the limit. In one of the more novel applications of the API for audio-storing service SoundCloud, one 3D printer is happily turning your music tracks and recordings into custom iPhone cases, each uniquely based on the waveform of your sounds.

This week in Austin at South by Southwest, SoundCloud was attracting attention with that notion, as partner manager Caroline Drucker showed off a custom case built from the sound of her walking across a train platform a pair of signature high heels. (It’s the U6 U-Bahnhof Schwartzkopffstraße, if you must know, specifically. The USA Today featured the footwear and the case. “Must’ve been the shoes.”)

It’s primarily for fun, of course, but it does illustrate a point. Just having a smartphone along is enough to capture sound in all kinds of situations – don’t overlook the built-in mic. (Just make sure you’ve got ample focus on whatever you’re trying to record, since these mics are very vulnerable to background and ambient noise, and use an app that lets you record in a lossless format, making it more useful for musical sampling.) Odds are you’ve been in the situation Caroline was and – if you’re paying attention to your environment – got a great sound just walking around.

Here’s that original sound, as recorded with the iPhone SoundCloud app (equivalents are available for other platforms, too, so finally put that mic to use for something other than just calls):

And if you do want to sport your sounds on an iPhone case, check out the cool Shapeways app. (And this might just give you other 3D printing or laser-cutting ideas, so go for it.)

http://www.shapeways.com/creator/thevibe

More on some of the other SoundCloud news soon.

You can visit CDM’s editor on SoundCloud, of course. Lots of people send tracks, so if you share your work, send a note to go with it, please!

I’m saddened to learn of the death of Richard Lainhart, the New York-based composer and artist who has been inseparable from the experimental electronic scene for many years. I knew Richard to be a gentle and imaginative soul, an inventive technologist, someone capable of dreaming up endless soundscapes and auditory worlds. He was also a great contributor to the CDM community, including playing one of the early installments of Handmade Music at Etsy Labs in Brooklyn. (Photo above; full video at bottom.)

I think it’s fitting to illustrate Richard with a terrific self-portrait on Polaroid, one that illustrates his sense of humor and artistic adventurousness:

Richard’s wife Caroline posted a note with the news, which most of us found via Facebook:

Richard Lainhart February 14, 1953 – December 30, 2011

Dear friends of Richard,
It is with a heavy heart that I that I must tell you Richard Lainhart, composer, musician, technologist, filmmaker, and digital artisan died Friday, December 30, 2011.

On December 17, Richard complained of pains in his side and was admitted to the hospital for tests which showed an intestinal cancer. He was operated on on December 21. After the surgery (which showed the cancer had not spread), there were infectious complications which took his life on December 30.

He struggled valiantly to overcome his infection, but it was not to be. We are all in shock and cannot grasp the idea of his not making music, talking music, teaching, posting and playing.

Caroline Meyers
Richard Lainhart’s wife

Richard leaves behind a massive body of work and digital footprints; I’ve selected some of those below, including music, a wonderful set of images working with digital manipulation and Polaroids via Flickr, and his series on creative sound design tutorials.

Playing Messiaen:

Audiovisual work:

Richard’s most recent album, via Bandcamp:

Most recent SoundCloud contributions, including the winds after Tropical Storm Irene (that sound certainly is part of my sonic memory of 2011)

Sounds of my World – Post-Irene Winds 8-28-11 by rlainhart

200e-Continuum Percussive Study 2 by rlainhart

Sounds of my world – Rainforest V, New York Electronic Art Festival, 7-30-11 by rlainhart

I adore his photographic work:

A bio:

Richard Lainhart is an award-winning composer, author, and filmmaker – a digital artisan who works with sonic and visual data. Since childhood, he’s been interested in natural processes such as waves, flames and clouds, in harmonics and harmony, and in creative interactions with machines, using them as compositional methods to present sounds and images that are as beautiful as he can make them.

Lainhart studied composition and electronic music with Joel Chadabe at the State University of New York at Albany. He has composed music for film, television, CD-ROMs, interactive applications, and the Web. His compositions have been performed in the US, England, Sweden, Germany, Australia, and Japan. Recordings of his music have appeared on the Periodic Music, Vacant Lot, XI Records, Airglow Music, Tobira Records, and ExOvo labels. As an active performer, Lainhart has appeared in public approximately 2000 times. Besides performing his own work, he has worked and performed with John Cage, David Tudor, Steve Reich, Phill Niblock, David Berhman, and Jordan Rudess, among many others. He has composed over 100 electronic and acoustic works. In 2008, he was commissioned by the Electronic Music Foundation to contribute a work to New York Soundscape.

Lainhart’s animations and short films have been shown at festivals in the US, the UK, Canada, Germany, and Korea, and online at ResFest, The New Venue, The Bitscreen, and Streaming Cinema 2.0. His film “A Haiku Setting” won awards in several categories at the 2002 International Festival of Cinema and Technology in Toronto. In 2009, he was awarded a Film & Media grant by the New York State Council on the Arts for “No Other Time”, full-length intermedia performance designed for a large reverberant space, combining live analog electronics with four-channel playback, and high-definition computer-animated film projection.

quotes

“Lainhart crafts sounds in a tonal, musical fashion – sustained tones, drones, melodic fragments – and electronically manipulates them into beautiful tapestries of sound.” (Waterfront Week)

[His] “music reflects the spirit of possibility that once defined electronic music, bringing with it a sense of past, present and future that transcends time, technology and cultural assumptions. The spell- binding music seemed to evoke feelings that can’t quite be named, and suggest music I might rather imagine for myself in silence than trust most composers to compose.” (The Village Voice).

“He’s evolved a singular vision as a composer, performer and engineer of darkly seductive minimalism.” (Peter Marsh, BBC)

And here is Richard’s performance for us at Handmade Music on the Buchla 200e synth and Continuum Fingerboard, from 2007:

http://www.otownmedia.com
http://www.vimeo.com/rlainhart
http://www.youtube.com/rlainhart
http://richardlainhart.bandcamp.com/
http://soundcloud.com/rlainhart
http://twitter.com/rlainhart
http://www.facebook.com/rlainhart
http://www.downloadplatform.com/richard_lainhart

What an extraordinary thing an interface can be, a map to making music.

A new community-generated album from users of the now-legendary monome grid instrument yields a variety of musical outcomes. The results are instrumental and lovely, breaking off on lots of different stylistic vectors, but glued together by the notion of key and pitch. Let’s let contributor Joshua Saddler explain this – and the holiday album – as well as share some of the music. If you celebrate Orthodox Christmas or more generally the idea of “Holidays” (ahem), or if you just like good music, you can overlook the fact that the latter arrives a bit late on the Western calendar. But both albums are terrific, and I suspect the approach to the music in key, to sharing samples and field recordings, could well be an inspiration in your own music-making endeavors. Sometimes rules are liberating.

If you want to get a jump start on musical New Year’s resolutions, I can think of nothing better. Joshua writes:

The monome community has released not one, but two albums for the holidays. Both are freely available at http://mcrpmusic.bandcamp.com

The first, MCRPv11 (Monome Community Remix Project, volume 11), was released mid-November, five months after the MCRPv10 album (which CDM has previously covered).

http://mcrpmusic.bandcamp.com/album/mcrpv11-all-keyed-up-edition

As with all MCRP albums, there are guidelines and a theme. Participants submitted a field recording and a short instrumental sample in the key of G/E-minor. The participants then chose as many samples as they wished from the shared pool (though they couldn’t use their own samples), and had a couple of weeks to assemble their tracks. Sounds ranged from falling rocks to ocean waves to modular synthesizers to toy ukeleles and dogs barking. From this pool emerged fifteen startlingly diverse tracks.

Have a listen, and head to Bandcamp for downloads in any format you desire:

I appreciate the chance to see Joshua’s process in video:

I’m pretty pleased with how my contribution, “mnml autmn,” turned out:

mnml autmn by ioflow

I sequenced bits and pieces from four samples with Renoise (in some cases using single-cycle waveforms…so it still counts, even if it sounds nothing like the original!), exported sections to loops, and performed them live with rove (http://docs.monome.org/doku.php?id=app:rove) on a monome 128. I recorded and rearranged the resulting segments using Ardour3‘s timeline view. The tracker and the traditional DAW actually worked well together. As I’m the sole Linux musician on the album, composing and arranging takes much longer using free software than more common tools like Ableton Live. Things that took me hours are probably three-click operations in Live. Still, by having to strike out on my own, I learn so many new things each time I sit down to create…it’s worth the occasional frustration at not being able to do things the easy way, using the same process as everyone else.

The second release is the annual Monome Community Christmas Album volume 2, made available on December 21.

http://mcrpmusic.bandcamp.com/album/monome-community-christmas-album-volume-2

This project had much more leeway; no hard-and-fast rules about samples or themes. I ended up forgoing the monome entirely for this album, instead improvising an original acoustic piano piece:

gloria by ioflow

http://soundcloud.com/ioflow/gloria

There were fewer participants for MCXAv2, since it began immediately after MCRPv11, but the quality of the tracks is still extraordinary. Warm neo-retro-loungetronica. I’ll be listening to it year-round, not just in December.

Me, too. And perhaps you, as well:

Thanks, monome-ers!

http://monome.org

You’ll find plenty of contact mic tutorials floating around the Web, but bassling (Jason Richardson) – working with a learned technique – has what I think is a really nice example, one that sounds really good. It’s easy to do, but unlike a popular tutorial (and one I’ve tried myself), you won’t wind up dis-assembling a Radio Shack piezo speaker. The result is an inexpensive, versatile microphone that will happily go places your conventional mic won’t, giving you new possibilities for sampling and sound design.

bassling credits his source:

This technique was taught to me by Alan Lamb when we worked together as part of the 2006 Unsound Festival. He’d developed this approach for recording ‘the wires,’ a large-scale aeolian harp modeled on telegraph poles he recorded in Western Australia.

Full tutorial:
How to make contact microphones [Bassling / Selectronica blog]

Here’s what it sounds like:
Piezo contact mic demonstration using a biscuit tin as a hand drum by bassling

I’d love to hear from readers: have you built contact mics? Which technique worked best for you?

And, if you try this one, any suggestions on various suppliers for the piezo crystal part itself? (Particularly in the US, Germany and continental Europe, UK, Japan, other places we have lots of readers.)

More:
Creme Dementia’s handmade bottle cap mics, on GetLoFi
Tutorials on the “Radio Shack” approach (though I like the one above better):
furious contact microphone assembly
Make a DIY Contact Microphone

The possibilities of a microphone and the world are limitless, so as this week we looked at a recording of music made with playgrounds, a mic, and Ableton Live, readers responded in kind with a fantastic spectrum of sampling-inspired, real world-produced musical wonder. From comments, a few examples:

Diego Stocco, a favorite sound designer on this site, ventures in his latest installment into a dry cleaner. Clean, wrinkle-free clothes and great music – see, you don’t actually have to choose. See top.

“Vega” by CDM reader Cordovan Music (Gregory Reeves), is an eerily-lovely ambient score made from LA’s freeways – and perhaps an ominous, if beautiful, portent of a lot of us driving on said freeways for NAMM in January.

Vega by Cordovan Music

From the experimental and minimal ambient release “Photic”, “Vega” is made entirely from field recordings taken on Los Angeles freeways.
About the album:
Gregory Reeves is a Los Angeles-based electronic artist, composer, and musician. His work can be heard on A&E, History Channel, FUEL TV, Universal, EA Games and many more. His sound art and installation work includes pieces for the Gaffa Gallery, Sydney, as well as creating a soundscape for the huge geodesic dome at the Peats Ridge festival in Australia, New Years eve. Electronic releases under various aliases have received winning reviews in XLR8R, URB, JazzTimes, and Rolling Stone. Remixes include Bob Marley and the Wailers (“One Love” from “Roots Rock Remixed” on Tuff Gong/Quango), Sarah Vaughan, and others.
“Photic” is a collection of minimal, generative ambient works. “Vega” is made entirely from manipulated field recordings taken on Los Angeles freeways. “Dark Field” uses convolved urban sounds to create a brooding ambient soundscape (the piece was originally composed for the DUOscope multimedia installation in Sydney). “Anemone” was created using undersea video footage to generate musical events, while “Haiku in C” is based on classical Japanese Gagaku music. For fans of Brian Eno, Murcof, and Loscil

Reader Cillian John, in the more pedestrian-friendly city of Stockholm, looked instead to escalators.

On and on by cillianjohn

He writes:

The urban environment is full of inspiring noises. I particularly enjoy the mechanical rhythms you hear all round.
The rhythmic element of this track is a field recording of escalator I recorded while on a trip to Stockholm.

Audiovisual remix superstar Pogo, aka Perth, Australia-based Nick Bertke, is embarking on a mission to “remix the world” as has inspired the headline of this post. Check out the spectacular results, and perhaps even get involved (thanks, BenAlex):

http://www.pogomix.net/remixing-the-world/
Kickstarter on Tibet

(I’m awaiting further details, but I am personally angered by the apparent mistreatment of Bertke which recently resulted in a 10-year deportation from the United States of America – and even that only after seemingly-extreme prison time and detainment that required the intervention of the consulate of New Zealand; you can follow on his blog. I’ve been deeply frustrated by the apparent targeting of artists, whatever the requirements of the law, in the US and Canada. More on that soon; anyone with expertise or experience in these matters, I’d love to hear from you. I feel it’s worth bringing up, as I’m sure that someone would have done so in comments as this story has spread.)

I’m sure there are many, many other examples, but this seems to me a nice place to begin – and fertile ground for inspiration to make something yourself.

Sonic and musical inspiration are never far away, especially with a microphone in hand. For the latest example, Ableton Live meets a local playground.

Jason Richard, aka “bassling,” used field recordings in the park to compose a track. He writes:

I’ve been recording playgrounds and remixing the sounds in Ableton Live to create tracks. To help people understand what they’re hearing, I’ve been making short videos showing some of the process.

It’s an idea I’ve had in mind for a while and the centenary is deadline to work towards. I’m inspired by the Italian Futurists and Alan Lamb, who mentored me in 2006 as part of the Unsound Festival.

The playground is part of a series of videos of local playgrounds, intended to celebrate the 2012 centenary of Leeton in New South Wales, Australia. (That’s southeastern Australia, for the uninitiated.)

More information:
http://bassling.blogspot.com/

It’s really nice having the video to serve as a guide to the music, I think. So, what field recordings have inspired you? Let us know.