The practice involves the situation of the street as a natural environment. Using this as a starting point, i have conducted various iterations of ‘field recording’ – wherein the use of found sound and video results in accidental composition – the augmented audio video work. The process ends up as an archive of durational long form content. I tend to use Youtube as part of the practice, recording sequentially, streaming with multiple cameras and microphones.
audio and video compositions from the street
1. Room tone
Room tone combines standard field recording ‘phonography’ technique, and computer generated audio tools, following in methodology the discipline of electroacoustic music in form and function.
Instead of standard microphones, i am using cameras. This comes from an interest in the audio track of video recordings, falling pretty much into the realm of *audio description, also called video description in current television broadcast technology.
With this as a guide, i place cameras (ie: microphones) in various locations on the building at 24 Charoenkrung road. From the roof – as i have already been filming Icon Siam tower, i get the sound of the outside viewpoint. From inside the ground floor, i get a different kind of input from the cameras.
The live audio is then run thru a certain set of computer sound tools (DAW). The process then starts to convert this data into a musical composition. As i am already in the habit of streaming the video track thru youtube, i started recording these audio test tracks in August 2020
Single track
Playlist
in this setup every sound in the room is translated into an audio composition, the ‘room tone’.
This leads to the notion of a performance in which a small chamber ensemble is put in a ‘causal’ relationship with the audio tools, a feature that has not yet started to be explored. I have currently been controlling / filtering / tuning the room tone qualities to make sure that the sounds such as pitch and timbre are explicitly and directly the controlling source (not random) and endeavoring to make the input to the output in a very direct relationship.
In electroacoustic music, a historical starting point is the use of microphones as an input source for composition, in combination with various electronic tools used to manipulate *the timbres of acoustic sounds.
