Noise poetics

Abstract

This paper attempts to analyze connections between the urban sound environment and electroacoustic–acousmatic music composition. Having chosen recorded sound as the main material of my sonic art, I sometimes use unprocessed sound and drive the composition forward by editing, according to the locally emerging myth. Alternatively, I might use recorded sound as a malleable material I can warp to the extreme. 'Real world' sound has a certain power on the mind of the listener and so have processes of its transformation, playing with degrees of recognizability and laying out idiosyncratic dream-scapes to follow and explore. The urban soundscape, appreciated as a city dweller’s natural sonic environment, significantly informs my creative processes. As continuous exposition to certain sounds tends to redefine the archetypes that govern the way sound is evaluated as art, the meaning and cultural significance of noise changes. Exploring the concepts of noise, soundscape and creative field-recording as listener, engineer, sound designer and composer, I approach mechanisms that allow the sounds of everyday life to participate in the development of a compositional language connected with fundamental elements of music tradition and directly dependent on the ways sound might be appraised.