Week Three Project

Despite the grey and rainy weather this week, I did manage to venture outside and record some sounds for my Week Three Project. 

When I was walking around South Lake Union and Downtown wondering what to record, I realised that Seattle (and especially South Lake Union where we live) is in the midst of a huge phase of expansion.  There are construction sites everywhere, and they've really just blended into every day life.  I had almost forgotten that for the past 3 weeks I've been woken up by cranes working on the construction site across the road from our apartment. 

So, this week I visited about 6 construction sites and recorded construction sounds. 

Construction site near Wholefoods.  OMG how good is Wholefoods?!

Construction site across the road from our apartment.

Another construction site about a block away from our apartment.

Due in part to the weather (but mostly because of sheer laziness), I decided it wasn't a great idea to go traipsing around with our laptop and good microphones, so instead I did all my recording on my iPhone.  Gotta love 'voice memos'!

As I listened to the sounds I'd recorded, I discovered that they had their own distinct rhythms and pitches and were really quite beautiful.  So I looped parts of each of the five recordings (each loop is a different length) and I added extremely simple instrumentation to them to enhance their natural rhythms and pitches.   

Here's a link to my Week Three Project on SoundCloud:



The end result is that this week's piece is more a study in sounds than a traditional composition, but it was really fun to do.