Pinchinko granular synthesis

Brendan Rehill reimagines Gavin Prior's sound from Osaka. He writes: "When I was younger, Japan fascinated me; so, immediately it jumped out from the list of field recordings to choose from for this project.

The recording is a wash of confusing noise from the 'pinchinko' arcade machines, apparently the only form of gambling that is legally acceptable in Japan. It's stunning the volume of noise they make, especially in light of the fact the Japanese government are only just now looking at lifting a ban on children being allowed to make noise above 45dB SPL in suburban areas.

As excitingly noisy as the recording is, it makes it very difficult to separate out elements to re-contextualise. All is noise. I became a little worried that I wouldn't be able to make anything of it.

Luckily, I had the Oblique Strategies to consider. I took them somewhat literally, relating the instructions to technical aspects of audio. There are voices in the recording, human and machine, so I would use them. And, to me, lowest common denominator, related to me ideas of granular synthesis.

I began playing with sections of the recording in Ableton, using Robert Henke's Granulator, which resulted in some of the washing and repetitive noises. I worked in Pro Tools also, and started to explore taking tiny slices of the audio of the voices, and manipulating those. This formed the introductory parts of the memory. As it is a memory, I felt the short slices were like the firing of the synapses as your brain accesses a memory, the washes of sound are the impressionistic idea of the place that memory holds, and the bit reduced crunching and confusion is the difficulty of holding on to a memory, particularly of a place that would challenge the senses as much as a pinchinko arcade."