I slightly modified the assignment (read: I misunderstood it at first and did something different) to portray how even a more-or–less okay piece of music can be degraded and subverted by being used as aural mogadon by a call centre, especially if you’ve been listening for 40 minutes and your ears are bleeding.
This uses a YouTube clip by Channel Swimmer at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0s6bv4yayOk which has 1hr10min of on-hold music, some of it quite fun listening. Most of this is based on progressively more degraded versions of the first piece, lasting a couple of minutes. I kept the whole thing and put the rest through a sliding stretch (several times) in order to bring down the time and turn it into an appropriately and increasingly featureless blur of sound.
The last degradation, using an Audacity distortion plugin I just discovered, is actually the sort of thing I would rather listen to if I had to be on hold for any length of time. That, or the sound of the relevant company’s CEO being flogged with red hot chains and rolled in salt.
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The Assignment: Record music intended to sound just as garbled as the hold music on a phone call.
Step 1: Think of a time when you were put on hold by customer service or waiting for a conference call to begin. Think about such a situation when the hold music sounded like it had been run through a washing machine, or put through a bit crusher, or photocopied 100 times in sequence before it got to your ear.
Step 2: Record a short piece of music intended to sound just as garbled as the hold music on a modern phone call. Think of this as “hold noise.”
More on this 423rd weekly Disquiet Junto project — Hold Noise / The Assignment: Record music intended to sound just as garbled as the hold music on a phone call — at:
https://disquiet.com/0423/
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/
