Degree Show 2025

I am well acquainted with the ruckus and tenderness of Glasgow, having made a number field recordings in the city over the years. For this project, I concerned myself with capturing new tonality and rhythm from an environment I’m familiar with. To me this piece is about the microscopic or silent emotional world of urban spaces. By blending three types of sound (transparent field recordings, vague textures, and synth arpeggios) I was able to explore a new perspective on urban spaces, of our own biological sounds, and imply emotional context through music.

There were several factors that guided my direction, and aesthetic of the track. Namely, the nature of the field recordings I captured and the reactive composition techniques I explored. The contact mic (CM) samples translated well into biological noises like breathing, heartbeats, and swallowing but are still sympathetic to the mechanical noises of urban environments. The underlayers of transparent field recordings and warped looped field recordings ground the soundscape to a real but unfamiliar urban. The swelling reactive synth lines help to emotionally contextualise the soundscape with ascending arpeggios and woozy vibrato. In this brief conceptual statement, I will discuss the thinking behind the contact mic field recordings and its relationship to the themes presented in the soundscape.

I explored several concepts in sound to inform my production of the soundscape. Namely that of John Cage and in using chance or reactivity to create music. He noted that by means of our decreasing dominance over our own complex societies and of earth – music or art that blindly promotes control is in opposition to our actual place in reality. He suggests that natural flow and impermanence better serve our us than the unflinching unchanging structures that western ideology concerns itself with John Cage. Cage promotes ‘letting sounds be themselves’. Sound can be heard purely as itself and ‘not depend for its value on its place within a system of sounds’. This informed my use of music concrete to arrange the CM samples. I wanted to avoid tempo or rhythm to better emphasis the alien nature of the recordings and felt they thrived better when placed sparsely like in early electronic music. However, to ground it emotionally I employed a synth part that reacted to the density of sound in the main music concrete part, letting the synth breathe life into the music concrete and instantly making it more relatable.

The CM samples exist entirely in the realm of anthrophony. Consider typical field recordings where some level of biophony, anthrophony, and geophony are present in the recording, even just briefly. When field recording with a contact mic there is very little capacity to capture the sound of birds or wind etc making the recordings completely alien. This kind of recording as accessing ‘hidden or microscopic’ sounds that exist in their own hard to access parallel world. This feeds into Cage’s argument that there is no such thing a silence. The sound of our bodies, of our listening environments, the worlds we inhabit emit constant noise that pour into our musical work. He argues that to ignore the noise within musical pauses, of attempted silence, is to deny our place within the real world. I also considered the beauty bias in acoustic ecology where urban field recordings are typically regarded as unwieldy or unpleasant.

For the soundscape I attempted to subvert this notion, framing the quite harsh and chaotic CM recordings as ethereal or intimate similar to the ambient works of Burial (2007) while also highlighting the hidden and silent world of sound they come from. I also drew from Michael Chion who suggested that when sounds lose their physical context, they become ambiguous and through reductive listening can be heard as something new. Through what he calls synchresis, one sound can fill the gap of another if the context is right. In this case the sounds of metal scraping became breathing and deep metallic donks became heartbeats. Field recordings of the city typically are defined by traffic, pollution, and layers of indistinct indifferent chatter. The dulled, resonate world of contact vibrations is one without words or pollution to me. It’s a simple and dense world and has an intimacy not usually found in the wide spectrum soundscapes of typical urban field recordings. This piece focuses on the warmth and interior of the city. Not so much so interior spaces but safe spaces away from the decay and gaudy layering of modern cities. For me it’s as if you can hear a hidden and intimate part of the city gently stirring as if its alive. At times you can hearing a raspy breathing or metallic heartbeats and when the synth swells it feel like pockets of light illuminating this hidden world. Its nervous, timid, and elative energy contrasts with my previous works in the same field.