ryan rapsys :: composer, producer, musician, filmmaker

Here’s the final Sonic Scultpure of April, 2008:

2008: 53 Sonic Sculptures – 19. May II [1 min 10 sec, 1.07mb mp3]

I decided to really try and capture this exact moment. About forty-five minutes ago, I set my mini-disc recorder on my windowsill, opened the window, and hit record. I recorded about 6 minutes of the sounds going on outside.

Using Adobe Audition, I broke the segment of audio I had recorded into 5 sections of about one minute and ten seconds long, and layered them one atop another. Next, I did what many purest musicians and music fans would normally be appalled by – I compressed it considerably (using mostly Hard Limiting in Audition).

With a very dense sounding texture of hissy wind and birds chirping, I began sculpting. Next I EQed the sound several times to thin it slightly. Then I proceed to use various Noise Reduction techniques to further thin out the sound, leaving behind only the most interesting of the sounds (mostly the bird chirping). By this point, however, through this process of scultping, the bird chirps of course became a bit distorted and such, but that is the idea of sculpting sound. To finish it off, I reversed the sample, then added a fade in and fade out at the beginning and end.