Resiliente (binaural)
Jul 19, 03:24 PM
"Out of all of the choices for field recordings, this one felt the closest to me. I grew up and lived all of my life in Chile, until I came to study in the US in 2017. The scene that is described in the field recording has become very familiar in the academic institutions that I’ve attended, where most of the labor behind the repair and construction of new buildings is carried out by Central and South American migrant workers.
"The field recording truly captures the dryness of the weather and reflects on the precarity and exploitation of migrant workers to build luxury condos in a city that is going through a record breaking drought. I originally wanted to emphasize these characteristics in my composition. I started by selecting and classifying different sections of the recording: wind sounds, trucks beeping, voices singing, and nail/staple guns. In this process, it is sometimes impossible to separate the different sound sources as they overlap and are all contained in a stereo recording. I experimented with the FluCoMa library in Max/MSP in order to separate the stereo file in different components. What it does is that it analyzes the sound file and tries to identify and put together sounds that are similar to each other (in their spectral and loudness features).
"Through experimenting with it multiple times, I was able to separate the different sound sources. In many cases it was not perfect, but the imperfections either added a grainy element to the sound, or ended up taking a particular color that was different from the original. I thought these new renderings of the field recording would contribute to the portrayal of precarity and dryness. I constructed the piece using small chunks and snippets from the FluCoMa renderings of the field recordings.
"These were many times stretched and pitch shifted to add variation to the material and play with the pitched elements in the recordings. In the late part of the process I added a variety of synthesized sounds that were processed together with the field recordings through granular synthesis, filters and delays.
"In the end what started to emerge in the piece, was that within the dryness, the precariousness and exploitation, the workers sing, and that singing, I interpret it as an act of resilience, as a desire to keep going in the hope that things will get better. I worked the piece as an immersive multi-channel composition – this version is a binaural render of it, so it is better experienced with headphones."
Phoenix construction workers reimagined by Matias Vilaplana Stark.
Part of the Migration Sounds project, the world’s first collection of the sounds of human migration.
For more information and to explore the project, see https://www.citiesandmemory.com/migration
"The field recording truly captures the dryness of the weather and reflects on the precarity and exploitation of migrant workers to build luxury condos in a city that is going through a record breaking drought. I originally wanted to emphasize these characteristics in my composition. I started by selecting and classifying different sections of the recording: wind sounds, trucks beeping, voices singing, and nail/staple guns. In this process, it is sometimes impossible to separate the different sound sources as they overlap and are all contained in a stereo recording. I experimented with the FluCoMa library in Max/MSP in order to separate the stereo file in different components. What it does is that it analyzes the sound file and tries to identify and put together sounds that are similar to each other (in their spectral and loudness features).
"Through experimenting with it multiple times, I was able to separate the different sound sources. In many cases it was not perfect, but the imperfections either added a grainy element to the sound, or ended up taking a particular color that was different from the original. I thought these new renderings of the field recording would contribute to the portrayal of precarity and dryness. I constructed the piece using small chunks and snippets from the FluCoMa renderings of the field recordings.
"These were many times stretched and pitch shifted to add variation to the material and play with the pitched elements in the recordings. In the late part of the process I added a variety of synthesized sounds that were processed together with the field recordings through granular synthesis, filters and delays.
"In the end what started to emerge in the piece, was that within the dryness, the precariousness and exploitation, the workers sing, and that singing, I interpret it as an act of resilience, as a desire to keep going in the hope that things will get better. I worked the piece as an immersive multi-channel composition – this version is a binaural render of it, so it is better experienced with headphones."
Phoenix construction workers reimagined by Matias Vilaplana Stark.
Part of the Migration Sounds project, the world’s first collection of the sounds of human migration.
For more information and to explore the project, see https://www.citiesandmemory.com/migration