"City Soundings (collaboration)" -- commentary (Brad Garton music)

City Soundings (collaboration)

hardware: Apple MacBook (intel)/OSX
software: Digital Performer 5
plus whatever other participants used...

Two good friends of mine, Wiksa Radkiewicz and Andrea Cohen, have been doing networked projects for the past several years (Sound-Son). Most of their work has been with kids, but they had an opportunity to do a networked/collaborative music composition as part of the 2011 Radiophonic Creation Day. They contacted fifteen people (including themselves) to work on an "Exquisite Corpse"-like project using sounds each of us recorded locally. This was the initial invitation that they sent to the participants:

With the new year we want to invite you to participate in a collaborative composition that will be presented at the a new edition of the International Radiophonic Creation Day, a biennale of radio works (http://shakerattleroll.parisson.org/home.php). Two years ago we presented at this biennale a sound piece called A deux voix moments that was created in a process of exchanging sounds and composed fragments. This year, after receiving an invitation to participate in the biennale again, we thought to extend the idea of composing in a similar fashion to a group of composers and sound artists that we know in several countries. In this project we would like to explore a multitude of urban soundscapes and the variety of ways these sounds can coexist in one piece. We will be working in three stages (from February 1st to April 22nd, , the deadline for sending the composition):

-Recording sounds in the respective cities
-composing fragments ad libitum using all the recorded sounds
-composing the piece using the method of Cadavre Exquis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exquisite_corpse), that is the piece will be shaped by each participant adding something to it in an order pre-established by chance drawing.

We were then instructed to create a 'bank' of sounds to be used in the final piece-construction:

We are starting the process of uploading soundscapes.
Phase one -sound recording
We think we should limit the number of recordings to 3 (or less) per person and the length of each recording to one minute. The kind of sounds you might record:
-soundscapes that characterize your city
-places you like or dislike
-places that remained in your memory
-places where your presence is audible
-your voice in close up

The sounds may be recorded indoors or outdoors and may include your voice (your language) and/or voices inherent to the environment.
As far as the fragments are concern we will also set up some limits later on.

First, we want to constitute a bank of sounds. We wll start composing framents out of all the sounds on the site a few weeks into the project.

After we had all uploaded sounds to a central server, we then began constructing the piece in an order randomly-assigned by Wiska and Andrea. I was the penultimate composer, the ordered listing of composers involved was as follows:

Victoria Estok (USA)
Lidia Zielinska (Poland)
Andrei Smirnov (Russia)
Janete El Haouli (Brazil)
Wiska Radkiewicz (USA)
MalleMaltis (Estonia)
Andrew Hugill (UK)
Steven Brown (UK)
Franziska Schroeder (UK)
Andrea Cohen (France)
Marie Wennersten (Sweden)
Marek Choloniewski (Poland)
Brad Garton (USA)
Hernan Risso Patron (Argentina)

I was really pleased and impressed with the final results:

City_Soundings.mp3

12' 05" -- 14.5 Mbytes

and it was indeed broadcast during the "Radiophonic Creation Day". Yay!