Composing With Sounds : Musique Concrète
all sounds can lead to music
The resources for Composing With Sounds ...
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A sone, a sone, just leave me a sone ...
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Looking out of the study window and down what passes for a back garden, the peace is frequently broken by passing trains on the mainline railway at the far end. While the frequent and unpredictable noise means the study does not make a good recording studio, that railway line can also provide a good sound source for musique concrète. So, with the window open good and wide [don't try this in the winter!] I took a microphone clamp designed to mount on a cymbal stand, or perhaps a vocalist's mic stand to record an acoustic guitar - the kind of thing you can pick up from a good music shop for about a fiver ... With this clamp [slightly modified], and a couple of small blocks of wood [so I didn't totally wreck the paintwork on my windowframe] I fitted the clamp and mounted a cross-bar ... The microphones are a pair of Behringer C2 pencil-style miniature condenser mics, mounted as a crossed-pair. [I figured it might be fun to catch some impression of the motion of the passing trains, as well as the thunder of the track, the rumble of the wheels, the clatter of the carriages, the roar of the labouring locomotives ...] On a still day, the foam windshields supplied with the C2s proved adequate to remove wind noise, although I had to abandon my efforts on at least one of the days I wanted to work on this. [Note to self: this is a good reason for not leaving recording projects to the "last minute"!] With the mic cables sneaking back into a Fostex MR-8 digital multitrack recorder, I simply left things running for a few hours each session. Note: be careful of your neighbours if you try this - set-up at the wrong time of day and they may think you are spying - although, on the other hand, one of my sessions also caught some lovely water sounds when a neighbour started the fountain in their pond. The great thing about this sort of work is: you never know quite what sort of sounds you're going to catch... |
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Here, then, are some sones from the railway ...
Raw takes:
This batch are unprocessed, raw sounds, direct from the mics:
Norm 95:
Here are a few that have been normalised to 95% of available dynamic headroom:
Comparing some of the Norm 95 list with their original Raw takes should give you some ideas of what can be done to make the most of your original sound capture. Sometimes a sound is good "as is" - sometimes we need to "clean" it a little before we start to compose with it.