Thing 14: Audio
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As a kid, I consistently struggled to commit myself to the rigors of learning a musical instrument.
I took piano lessons for a while, and gave them up not long after realising that I couldn’t play like Little Richard straight away. I bought a bass guitar from a local pawn shop, and barely played it. I tried drums, but that stalled at a practise pad consisting of a rubber disc on a square piece of wood. Surely not how Keith Moon started out, I thought. I looked into saxophones, but the cost put me off any Coltrane dreams. The acoustic guitar I still own is probably dusted more than played, even if I do pick it up from time to time.
When I did finally find a role in teenage or young adult rock bands, it was as a singer. Even here though, I tended to try and channel the stage presence of other performers, such as Jagger or Bowie, into fronting an outfit rather than working those vocal chords to reach Sam Cooke-type heights (not like that was even possible).
When I started using a computer to make music however, learning how to sample, edit sound waves, or exploring the rudiments of sequencing, something seemed to click. I might never have produced electronic music to Kraftwerk or Orbital-level standards, but I was able to create something that seemed both listenable and which sounded unique to the ‘instrument’ it was made on.
From then on, digital audio as a creative tool became a thing.
The Zamora — ‘Pigeon Souvenirs’
The first ‘album length’ output that resulted from learning sampling and sequencing was ‘Pigeon Souvenirs’, a retrospective collection of songs and moments from the short lifespan of a Brighton band I briefly fronted called The Zamora.
The CD brought the band’s two studio EP recordings together, but also wove in several audio elements. These included extracts from radio or TV interviews that the band had done (heavily effects-laden), clips from Hitchcock’s ‘North By Northwest’ and a Doors live album, as well as a range of synth samples. Putting it together pushed my first (Windows) PC so far beyond its processing capacity, that it pretty much died after I produced it.
The Zamora SoundCloud playlist above includes just the band’s studio recordings from that collection, as my hesitance over publishing my work with additional uncleared copyrighted works made me think twice about uploading the whole collection.
Control K — ‘The Front Line (Redux)’
The first version of this album, pressed on CD and distributed to friends and family along with ‘Pigeon Souvenirs’, was a collection of tracks I’d built up over a couple of years of dabbling with making electronic music — released as Control K. Just like ‘Pigeon Souvenirs’, there were too many uncleared samples on it for me to feel comfortable publishing online. I reworked it without the uncleared samples — an interesting learning curve to work with — and put a new version out a couple of years later through a press-on-demand CD site.
‘The Front Line (Redux)’ is a bit of a random collection. There are attempts at several different music genres, including hip-hop, dub and ambient. There are plenty of field recordings included too, such as from the Feb 15th 2003 anti-war march in London (Jesse Jackson’s speech in Hyde Park, a crowd booing at the gates of Downing Street). This stemmed from trying to imagine what The Orb would have sounded like if they’d made protest music. Strangely, my attempt to get clearance for the Jesse Jackson speech ended up with me in a long phone call with his daughter Santita. Making the album still brought my Windows laptop to the end of it’s useful life.
I occasionally keep up the Control K moniker (see my Wikipedia Thing), but I haven’t managed to complete a second album’s worth yet.
One day, there’ll be time. One day…
Shelf Life — ‘Best Before End’
Shelf Life’s ‘Best Before End’ is my so-far only full length album conceived as an album in its own right. I started the band with a guitar-playing bar owner in a Tokyo suburb, co-writing the album with him as my songwriting partner. Although we were limited by a shared communicative ability — neither my Japanese nor his English were that great — we were able to develop a shared musical vision.
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As we had a producer for this one, I didn’t have as much to do with the digital production side of this (other than a little work with the designer on the sleeve). It was good for once to just be able to focus on the music.
Rootmap
Between 2011 and 2013, I studied for an MA in Digital Media, at Sussex University. I was particularly interested in this programme because it had both a theoretical aspect that would be useful for casting a more critical eye over contemporary digital practices, and a practical element that would be good for building existing practical skills. While I maintained a career development focus on education and digital technology for much of it, there were other projects I did on the MA that fell outside of my professional field.
One such project, for a module called ‘New Developments in Digital Media’, was titled ‘Rootmap’. I began exploring sound maps (‘digital geographical maps that put emphasis on the sonic representation of a specific location’) during this module and decided to create one of my own for the main assignment. ‘Rootmap’ took the results of a remix contest hosted by the Creative Commons remix community ccMixter and attempted to map the results. This was to gauge the migration of a remix across geographical space, or in other words, ‘tracing the spread of an idea’.
As I was working with complete downloaded mp3s, there was little actual audio production on this project. The main web page was written in HTML and CSS, with the map placemarkers also containing a little Javascript so that I could include an audio player for each song in the location it had come from.
This was surprisingly difficult as Google Maps don’t (or at least didn’t) natively offer the opportunity to embed Javascript in their placemarks. I therefore had to resort to using a third party application that had done something with the Google Maps API that was far beyond what I was capable of.
A fascinating exercise that I’d love to do more of…(again) one day.
The War & Peace Diaries
Another project completed for the MA — this time for a ‘Theory and Practice of Interactive Media’ module — was titled ‘The War & Peace Diaries’. I’m not 100% sure how to categorise it other than as a piece of interactive digital media, but it took the form of an interface with several calendar page views, each containing clickable audio elements. I described it in the project submission as an ‘audio database’.
For some time, I’d been sitting on an inherited copy of my great uncle’s World War Two diaries, and had long wondered what to do with them. He was a London-based Chemical Engineer who was involved in penicillin production during that war, and according to his diaries, was a fierce critic of the war on pacifist grounds. This project finally gave me something to do with those diaries. ‘The War & Peace Diaries’ incorporates recorded readings from his diaries juxtaposed with archive recordings from key points during the war itself.
I used Adobe Audition for recording and editing the diary readings and put the piece together in Flash. Audition was, I found, a much more enjoyable audio editor than the open source equivalent, Audacity, even though that’s what I use more often. It was a bit disappointing to work in Flash at the time as I knew it was on its way out as a standard for creating interactive media, but the experience was a great starting lesson in thinking about and authoring interactive digital content.
The D1 Radio Hour
With a career, a family and a serious commute, I do very little in the way of being part of a band these days. I do still manage to keep my hand in on the audio front, however, with an online radio channel I jointly run with some friends (broadcasting as The D1 Radio Hour).
The Thursday Night Show was conceived in 2012 from a means of being able to listen to a friend’s mixes over the Internet. I’d done quite a bit of radio work in my student years, but that was a long time ago. Nevertheless, doing some DJing online seemed like a good way of playing music with others without having to leave the house.
When I DJed on student radio, it was in a radio studio, with lots of relatively expensive equipment around me and the music being on black or silver discs stored on shelves in a physical library. Most of my sets were prepared and practised on an iPad app (on my long commutes), with the music managed in iTunes. A radio studio I could sling over my shoulder, or even in my pocket.
I’ve moved to using the open source DJ software Mixxx for broadcasting these days. There’s still quite a bit to learn to replicate some of what I managed on the iPad, but it’s already easier to manage the balance between music levels and mic input.
The Mixcloud page contains pretty much all the D1 Radio shows I’ve produced, going back to the first one in 2012. Listeners can interact live with me and any of the DJs on Thursday night via a chatroom on the main website. New ears always welcome!
