Potentialities

"When I was picking a sound to use for my submission, something about the rhythm and sounds of the timekeeping station caught my attention, and I really wanted to run with it and see where it went. I'd recently downloaded a marching band sample library and this gave me an excuse to get to grips with it.

I ran one of the beeps through a sampler and used it to create the other melodic parts, so it all more or less came out of the recording (I later added a synth bass and a choir to add a bit of extra colour).

I decided to use a three minute chunk of the clip, and I had an image of this timekeeping station counting out three minutes, and thinking about all the things that can happen around the world in those three minutes, it's where I got the title of 'Potentialities' from.

An odd thing I found, I went into the project expecting the bpm to be 60, what with it being a timekeeping station, but it turned out to be slightly slower (58 bpm). I can only assume this means the people of Canada take things a little slower than the rest of the world, it sounds like a nice idea."

Composition by David Devereux.

Part of the Shortwave Transmissions project, documenting and reimagining the sounds of shortwave radio - find out more and see the whole project at https://citiesandmemory.com/shortwave