Último Dia
Aug 15, 2022, 07:58 AM
Composition by Marcelo Carneiro.
The grainny-articulated characteristics of Summira 7, its facture and dynamic profiles, made me imagine punctuation marks triggering different scenes at each new attack. This was the base of my first musique anecdotique piece Último Dia (Last Day), and happened me to fulfill an idea I’ve been having for a while of using sounds with little or no transformation processes at all and ‘tell a story’.
I cut the 18 Summira 7 attacks with the aid of Composers Desktop Project (CDP), creating 18 different audio files, and re-opened them in the same software to build rhythmic patterns in different ways. The results were used in the last part of the piece. In many different moments I combined (assembled) Summira 7 files with other sounds I recorded myself - doors locks, metal closet doors, ice cubes clashing with each other - to reinforce its hard attacks (to use a schaefferian term) and make dramatic passages from one scene to another. All of those sounds, including Summira 7, have similar morphologies, which favors the assemblage.
The piece compositional method was montage.
The Último Dia Narrative
The pandemics, and the continuous lockdown during its first two years, made me think that we will come out of it with new communal values, less consumerism, alternatives to fossil fuel, an upgraded conscience regarding nature and economics, and of course a really practical anti-capitalist agenda. On the contrary: people decided to ‘come back’ to ‘normality’; meaning back to everything that made us get to the point we are now: global warming, fascist regimes coming out of pseudo-democratic governments, wars, hunger, religious intolerance, renewed imperialism, just to name a few. This, of course, will inevitably lead us to our last day on Earth; the last day of almost all living things. And the last day is what is narrated in this piece of musique anecdotique. It will probably not be a catastrophic event, but one that will happen without warning and possibly calmly.
The piece presents audio flashes of daily activities, daily scenes of the ‘normal’ lives we came back to – restaurants, shopping malls, the beach, home activities -, all of them separated by the sudden attacks of clicks and cranks created mostly with Summira 7 sound. All of a sudden, everything ends with its last sound-image of loss and acceptance.
No audio transformation was done; the only use I made of Composers Desktop Project was to create rhythmic patterns for audio number 12. Montage and mixing were in Cockos Reaper. Just a few EQ and reverb were used. Some noise reduction was done in Ocenaudio.
This is part of the Obsolete Sounds project, the world’s biggest collection of disappearing sounds and sounds that have become extinct – remixed and reimagined to create a brand new form of listening. Explore the whole project at https://citiesandmemory.com/obsolete-sounds
The grainny-articulated characteristics of Summira 7, its facture and dynamic profiles, made me imagine punctuation marks triggering different scenes at each new attack. This was the base of my first musique anecdotique piece Último Dia (Last Day), and happened me to fulfill an idea I’ve been having for a while of using sounds with little or no transformation processes at all and ‘tell a story’.
I cut the 18 Summira 7 attacks with the aid of Composers Desktop Project (CDP), creating 18 different audio files, and re-opened them in the same software to build rhythmic patterns in different ways. The results were used in the last part of the piece. In many different moments I combined (assembled) Summira 7 files with other sounds I recorded myself - doors locks, metal closet doors, ice cubes clashing with each other - to reinforce its hard attacks (to use a schaefferian term) and make dramatic passages from one scene to another. All of those sounds, including Summira 7, have similar morphologies, which favors the assemblage.
The piece compositional method was montage.
The Último Dia Narrative
The pandemics, and the continuous lockdown during its first two years, made me think that we will come out of it with new communal values, less consumerism, alternatives to fossil fuel, an upgraded conscience regarding nature and economics, and of course a really practical anti-capitalist agenda. On the contrary: people decided to ‘come back’ to ‘normality’; meaning back to everything that made us get to the point we are now: global warming, fascist regimes coming out of pseudo-democratic governments, wars, hunger, religious intolerance, renewed imperialism, just to name a few. This, of course, will inevitably lead us to our last day on Earth; the last day of almost all living things. And the last day is what is narrated in this piece of musique anecdotique. It will probably not be a catastrophic event, but one that will happen without warning and possibly calmly.
The piece presents audio flashes of daily activities, daily scenes of the ‘normal’ lives we came back to – restaurants, shopping malls, the beach, home activities -, all of them separated by the sudden attacks of clicks and cranks created mostly with Summira 7 sound. All of a sudden, everything ends with its last sound-image of loss and acceptance.
No audio transformation was done; the only use I made of Composers Desktop Project was to create rhythmic patterns for audio number 12. Montage and mixing were in Cockos Reaper. Just a few EQ and reverb were used. Some noise reduction was done in Ocenaudio.
This is part of the Obsolete Sounds project, the world’s biggest collection of disappearing sounds and sounds that have become extinct – remixed and reimagined to create a brand new form of listening. Explore the whole project at https://citiesandmemory.com/obsolete-sounds