Mysterious sounds in the Barceloneta neighborhood …
Hello everyone!
These are busy sonic days in the Barceloneta neighborhood!
Last Wednesday we started our session by listening to the composition you made with our sounds: it sounded awesome … and a bit scary!
We all agreed that we really liked the way you composed our sounds. Many felt as if they were listening to the soundrack of a scary movie!
So we imagined the story: a dark scenario, danger getting closer… and a wicked witch! We could hear the frightening steps of the witch chasing a child in the middle of a forest and then a mysterious rain of stones …
On thursday we got acquainted with the recorders and went out to practice with the sounds of our neighborhood, la Barceloneta. We started by walking, listening and recording sonic snaps through Andrea Doria Street, which connects our school to the marketplace.
It is a very nice and lively neigborhood, so we found lots and lots of sounds! Steps, works in progress, cars, pets, birds, sounds from the shops and then the wind and the greater sonic space of the market square. We felt like recording everything!
Some of us went inside the market and others went through the narrow lanes of the barrio in order to catch more snaps and practice recording technique.
After school we took the recorders home and kept recording all through the weekend, adding to our neighborhood repertoire some sounds of our daily life. We recorded fridges, books, a cashier and many more soundsnaps. Do you like them?
We are still collecting more to be ready for the postcards!!!
Secret soundscapes from Barcelona
“The Secret Sounds (from 4th grade class)” would be a rough translation of the title we chose for the Soundscape we made on the second session of the workshop.
We started the session carefully listening to the great mysounds recorded by both Belgian and Portuguese schools, trying to guess how where they produced, and attempting to select already some of them for our composition.
Since we did not have much time, we went straight to had a good look at the basic tools that Audacity offers us: moving, cutting, copying, pasting and the envelope tool; plus the “normalize” effect. Then we tried to bring together some of our favourite sounds from the other schools and started to build our soundscape.
We did not use any concept as point of departure for the composition, asking ourselves instead what did sound good to us. We tried to understand the waves, how visual transformations would affect the resulting sound, and payed special attention to the transitions between sounds. The envelope tool was the overall winner ;) and we used it to end our composition with a coming and going subtle sound.
We thank you very much for your recordings and wish you enjoy our little composition!
mysounds from Barcelona
It is always nice to see the kind of beloved objects that participants of TCR bring to the first session. They do not know we are going to use them as sound instruments!
And so, today all their little boxes covered by pictures and full of secrets, teddy bears, binoculars, books and glasses… were subjected to curious sonic exploration.
We started by collectively attempting to come up with possible ways of obtaining sounds from a single object. Then moved to individual exploration. An attempt was made to avoid hitting and scratching as too obvious or easy.
Paying attention to irregular surfaces, materials and moving parts proved to be a good way of obtaining sound. We wrote down how to produce this sounds.
During the recording we exercised collective silence and listening… using the pauses between a recording and the next, to cough and move around a bit before … hush!… and again… until all sounds where ready. Please enjoy them below, and do not forget to visit our Freesound page for the rest of them :)
http://www.freesound.org/people/thecityrings/
p.s. apologies for the phone-quality pictures, we promise not to forget our camera again , ouch! ;(
Compact Sonic Postcards from Essen!
The very last session on the project is over and we will definitely miss these meetings in the next weeks. It was so much fun.
We fougth with audacity (sometime things got lost or simply our hands slipped away, and suddeny everything was gone)
but we won!
We decided to make them short but effectiv. That was too because we had so many short recordings.
So here, dear folks from Palau Solità i Plegamans, are now our little sonic postcards for you.
To imagine what could be in the postcards and how it could be sounding like we draw even some postcards at home.
We found that easier (because we could talk about colours and form of sounds) than describing what one could send on a postcard, then we transformated these thoughts with the sounds we recorded at home to these results. We hope, you have fun listening.
And yes, we found the effect section in audacity! Hear what we have done!
After finishing our compositions we found it very easy to talk about pictures we got in our heads when we listened to the postcards of Can Cladellas (you will find the comments in the comments ;-) )
Because we now experienced that a sound when listened repeatedly, it get’s more and more abstract and we don’t perceive it any more as the source of the recording but as a part of a sound picture.
We loved the whole project so much, that we could edit the sounds ourselves, that we could take the recorders at home, that we were working in groups, …
A Parisian take on Ghent sounds
Hello all !
Well we had a very busy and productive afternoon. We first of all listened to the sounds from our partner school in Ghent, and had some difficulty in guessing all of them. In the end we voted on what we thought was the most likely sound source. If we heard correctly there were quite a lot kitchen utensils ? We imagined an egg timer ticking the seconds away, copper saucepans lids crashing together like cymbals, a metal tray banged with a soft object that sounded like a wonderful gong, and jam jar lids being pushed in and out. I won’t list what we made of all of the recordings, but we thoroughly enjoyed listening, so thank you.
For everyone in the class it was the first time using Audacity, so we went through the basics ( importing sounds, sequencing, editing) and just about managed to create three short soundscapes in the time we had left.
Each group heard something different in the sounds.
This first group imagined their composition as a fairytale set in a cave – kitchen. A new take on Cinderella ?
The second group heard environmental, pastoral sounds in the recordings. Inspired by this they created a walk in a forest where they stumble upon a woodcutter doing some carpentry.
The third group thought there was a lot of activity and movement in the recordings. They imagined cogs turning, springs bouncing and machines spinning into action all by themselves. Hear for yourselves :
We will not have a session tomorrow, it being Wednesday, and that means no school in France, so we will listen to our partner schools creations on Thursday. Happy recording.
Sonic Postcards from La Binquenais Rennes !
Hello,
This almost end of the great adventure The City Rings …we had great time !
So back to job. To compose our sonic postcards we used sounds coming from our everyday life like the subway (yes even if we are not that much a big city we have our “metro”) or some we recorded home during the week-end. For instance Seraht borrowed toys to his little brother to record them, or Bahar and Estella have recorded their way back home after school. In addition to this nice sounds we recorded on our own we used those made during school.
Now, we are more familiar with Audacity and we can make the audio postcards that we fancy.
Here is the result of our hard work after two sessions of audio editing. We hope that you will enjoy exploring our sound environment, maybe you will find in Belgium and Spain some similar sounds (metro, bus …?)
Soundscape time!
Our second session was quite exciting as we had just recieved a whole bunch of new MySounds from our friends in Belgium and France. At first we were busy for a while trying to guess where those misterious sounds were coming from. That wasn’t easy at all! At least we agreed that most of them were produced by rubbing or hitting an object. There was some shaking there too. We could also guess if the object was made from metal, clothes, paper, etc. Then we started thinking about some words that could describe each sound properly. At first we focused on describing what kind of emotions the sound provoked, namely, if that felt nice, or disturbing, or made us get goosebumps, and so on. We even found a “nervous” sound. Then we tried to link the sound to a more complex scenario, like a part of a movie or a story. Amongst other things we imagined a funny scene, Western-like, with a cowboy on a three legged horse. Crazy.
Well, that’s when composition time arrived. The kids were already familiar with Audacity (our usual audio editing software), because Flora, their music teacher, uses it for her classes. So we went over the basics and started working with the sounds we got from the french and belgian schools. We worked together, talking about whether we should use a particular sound or not, and what to do with it or where to put it in the timeline. We enjoyed using “crescendo and decrescendo” (something they learned from their music class too).
We regret not having more time to dig deeper into the compositional process; with one hour, and focusing on the process, time flies! In any case I think we successfully accomplished an interesting composition, with a totally cool ending ;)
MySounds from Rennes
Hello,
Here are the results of the first session (MySounds) of the The City Rings November 2012 edition :
For us in France, this is the first time we participate in the project and we are pleased to represent France!
We started the first session with a presentation of the schools participating in the project. We located Barcelona and Ghent on a map of Europe. Then we listened to the bells of each school and we have associated them with a word, an emotion or a feeling.
The teacher asked us to bring objects of our daily life (school, home, family, hobbies …). Electronic objects are not allowed. We realized an identity card of each object (name, origin, material, noise, sound available …). We explored these objects for their musical and sonic qualities.
Then, we reflected on how to manipulate the object to produce an interesting sound and then we recorded them. Discover here and try to guess the source of the sounds !
We listened to the recordings and we associated each sound with a motion, a material. We made a list of adjectives for each sound. We also associated a feeling and an emotion to each sound (anger, violence, joy, sadness, fear, etc.)..
Finally, we learned how to use Audacity. We did a small SoundScape of our classroom from “my sounds”.
Sonic Postcard from Greater London
We had such a great time contributing to the City Rings project and we literally recorded 100′s of sounds between a class of 30.
Because there were so many of us Patrick created a postcard using a selection of the sounds from our 10 sound recorders:
We also created 1 postcard each so in total we have 30 mini postcards for you to listen to! Here are a couple of examples, enjoy!
You can listen to and download the rest of the Sonic Postcards HERE
We had a little bit of time left at the end of our last session, so Serin, Taja and Deniz recorded each other talking about The City Rings project:
The Young Ears of Edmonton
This week our sound recorders made their inaugural exploration into the depths of North London….!!!!
What came back was astonishing; splashes, splurges, rattles, rustles, bangs, bumps, beeps, sizzles, machines, babies, alarms, meows, cock-a-doodle-doos, trains, cars and serendipities
But what was most interesting of all was hearing the overall sound of exploration…..!
