Here is an experiment utilizing a one minute field recording of the Silver Beach Carousel in Saint Joseph Michigan:
http://www.silverbeachcarousel.com/
I made the field recording after listening to the ebb and flow of the space near the shore of Lake Michigan for several minutes. An earlier recording featured just the carousel music with no announcements and I found that a bit same-y over the length of the recording. This one, with the announcer reminding the patrons to stay seated until the ride came to a stop had a bit more variety so I chose to work with it.
The instructions for this Disquiet Junto found me frantically trying to scribble some meaningful notations about what I was hearing whilst recording. I broke this part down by writing the numbers 5 to 60 in increments of five. This broke my minute into five second intervals and I noted things happening in the recording like "annoucement," "organ music," "vocal whoops," and "seated."
Then, when I returned home, I set out to complete the compositional element of this Junto. I fired up the Oberheim and fed a variety of CVs from it into the Elements. I settled on a bell-ish/drum-ish sort of sound and tried to imitate the sounds and patterns that I recalled while looking at my field notes for timing information.
I then combined the two sources in Ableton, trimmed to precisely one minute, and uploaded the results to soundcloud where I then first listened to the results after working partially blind/deaf through this. Neat!
More on this 231st weekly Disquiet Junto project — “Compose a piece to align with, from memory, 60 seconds of everyday sound” — at:
http://disquiet.com/0231/
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://disquiet.com/junto/
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