Ottski – Composing for Spaces and Places

Huge apologies for not posting in eons! My memory is absolutely terrible and I just so happened to forget this blog existed </3

Anyway!

We were tasked with booking out a Zoom Hn1 field recorder a while ago, maybe in late February, and I actually had a blast with it. It’s a stereo field mic that can store many recordings, and I ended up getting maybe 29 of them.

I started just outside of the Old Library Building, getting accustomed with the thing and recording random sounds here and there that ended up making it into the composition (such as an air con unit, birds and chatter).
I then moved on, recording the sound of the main road and bells, ambulances, basically anything I could. Then, walking down Northumberland Street, I recorded the jack hammers and drills (very loud construction) that were also used in the composition. Walking through M&S, I got some more chatter and a baby crying, something that I used in the climax of the piece.
Lastly, me and my fiance took a little trip to Leaze’s park! I got more birdsong, leaves rustling in the wind, ducks quacking, geese honking, pidgeons cooing, wings flapping, water gushing in the drains and a log splashing in the pond.

The whole field recording experience definitely pushed me to be more attentive to the ambient sounds of my surroundings. I now stil find myself taking a minute or two to actively sit and listen and appreciate what, previously, was just general noise (especially in nature!).

As for the composition, I put it together in Ableton Live – my first real test on the DAW. After about an hour of messing around and figuring out how to actually navigate the thing, I started properly curating the sounds I wanted to use and what story I wanted to tell. After some thought, I decided to use the sounds of nature and the city to convey an anxiety attack of sorts, moving from peace and tranquility, life, to the stressful grit of machines.

Although relatively short, I believe I conveyed what I wanted to. It has a sense of panic, the baby’s cry representing your inner child as you descend into a state of mind thats difficult to calm down from. The high drones sailing over top are paulstretched ambulance sirens (done on Audacity) that represent the kind of indescribable, confusing sense of unease when an anxiety attack is about to come. Although the noise calms down around 1:30, the unease is still there, still underlying.

Pretty proud of this! I should have posted it ages ago but, as I said, my memory is terrible!