Granulated tram

Part of our Dada Sound project (February 2016) - see more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/dadasounds

By Laurence Colbert. "One thing I think the DaDa sound artists would have loved would be granular synthesis. This principle / process takes small samples or ‘granules’ of sound from a recording and scatters them about within a given time frame. This means you can explode any sound into molecular sized objects playing from different points in time very quickly - it can be reimagined rather like some kind of abstract expressionist painting, or more specifically in this case: DaDa sound poetry.

The initial recording is of a Tram passing by in Oslo, Norway in August last year, and lasts for one minute.The reimagined sound, via granular synthesis: emerges from a particular tone, into scattered phonemes of the moving tram, progressing as the pieces of sound get smaller to a section that sounds like a fire crackling, and then back to a single tone; all in all lasting 2’51’’.

Original: recorded on TASCAM DR-40 with WindCat. Reimagined: created on Ableton Live 9, using Granulator II"