DJALCHEMI

Larking about with Sonic Art

For the last few Saturdays I've been doing Thomas Gardner's Sonic Arts course at the Mary Ward Centre. Today we moved from theory to practice, and started experimenting with applying various effects to soundscape recordings we'd made, using Max/MSP for the treatments.

There will be a performance of our collective composition, using live manipulations of our recordings, spoken text, and possibly my cracklebox, on 13 December. I quite like the recordings I made in their untreated state, so I've made mp3 versions of the sound of refuse collection outside my window — which I often get twice a day on weekdays — and a snippet of a journey on a Thameslink train (each is 1 minute long, and just under 1.2 MB).

Paul said that server disk space was not a problem, but that large bandwidth usage might be, so I'm gambling that these downloads won't become too popular — a safe bet… [Update 2 May 02005: They turned out to be surprising popular — probably just a by-product of unscrupulous people/services hoovering up all the mp3 files they can see. I've now posted the files on the wonderful freesound project, which will reduce the load on this server.]