College Record 2013

Imagine sitting on the London Underground. You can hear the clackety-clack
of the wheels on the track, which modulates as the train passes through stations
and junctions. Over this repetitious background, you might notice the squeaking
and creaking as the carriage sways in the momentum of travel. If you have fellow
passengers you might overhear snatches of conversation; different voices, accents,
languages. You might hear the spill from the headphones of a personal stereo; and
you can’t miss the official announcements: Mind the Gap!
This is not music per se. During rush hour it may be a form of torture that you share
with thousands of fellow commuters. For what it’s worth, I find listening to other
people’s music is frequently a form of torture. Noise can become music and music
can become noise. Time is a factor, and so is space.
You are sitting in the Harbour Quad. The buildings amplify and distort all sounds.
A plane goes overhead, the volume increasing as it approaches. The noise has a
particular density as it bounces around the surfaces of the College buildings. A
goose calls in alarm, another responds and, before you know it, the quad is awash
with sound. Then the plane passes over, the geese cease their fretting … someone
comes out of their room in B Block, the door slams and their footsteps ring out
as they head towards an unknown destination. This kind of audio narrative is
something that underpins one of my main pieces of work over the last year.
I had the idea to make a collage using sounds recorded around College. Recording
and manipulating audio is immensely enjoyable, and a different process from what
we might consider traditional composition. There are three distinct stages: first,
I go out into the field and gather sounds. I use a hand-held recorder with builtin
microphones, which is discreet and portable. I might carry it whilst walking
past the (now complete) building work, through quads and into the Library or
Hall. I might leave it recording in the Harbour Quad near to where the geese and
ducks roost at night. In essence, I gather raw material. Next, I load the audio onto
my computer and listen through it. I isolate sections and play with them: looping,
reversing, processing them through an array of effects that warp and distort the
sound. Finally, I order these sections into a narrative or set of discrete, linked events.
In this way, I finished Wolfscape I in the spring, and Wolfscape II just in time for the
opening of the Leonard Wolfson Auditorium. I’ve gathered all my source material
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