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[microsound] sampling/concepts/incidental music

There's all kinds of gray areas with regards to field recordings and
things that are musical.  What about something that sounds like isn't
music but isn't inteded as music, like car horns in traffic, which have
a definite pitch, or a doorbell, or ringtones on a phone?  I think it
would be hard to make a field recording in an urban environment without
encountering any musical or pseudo-musical content.
This discussion reminded me of a collaborative project that I was
inspired to do this winter: during a vacation to New York City I used my
Archos Jukebox to record about a hundred hours of whatever I was doing,
which was mostly hanging out in bars with friends.  Then when I came
back to Chicago, I played a DJ set at a bar that was just field
recordings of recorded pop songs played by DJ's in other bars (half as a
joke, and half to see if it just sounded like being in the same bar,
with more drunk people talking loudly around you.)
The project that this inspired was to do a series of recordings of
people interacting with the music in their environment.  During that
vacation in New York, I was listening to "Loaded" by the Velvet
Underground and when the song "Rock and Roll" came on my friend jumped
into this long rambling stoned story about being really depressed and
hearing this song when she was 15 and realizing that, like the girl in
the song, "it was all right" and her life really was saved by rock and
roll, but in a weird recursive way, because she was a generation younger
than the guy who wrote the song, her life was saved by a song about a
girl whose life was saved by rock and roll.  I knew there must be
thousands of other girls who had a similar epiphany to this song and
wanted to record all of them doing this kind of play by play commentary
to the song.  Or any other song.  The idea being to try to get a bunch
of people to all interact somehow to their favorite song and record just
the interactions, and see what kinds of aggregate patterns they follow
when the recordings are played together with the original song not being
audible.  Chances are the outcome would be alot of silly jokes (20
different people singing the guitar riff to "Smells like Teen Spirit" or
"More than a Feeling") but I think that it could yeild some intersting
results.
This idea is alot more about anthropology than electronic music but I
think it might provide some insight and inspiraton to ways of thinking
about sampling and field recording.



bil bo wrote:

A field recording could simply comprise of a microphone infront of a speaker, playing a copywrited pop mp3 (or sine wave).


i think that field recordings are significantly different, content-wise,
from sine waves. i'd say that they're not that different from 'musical'
samples, in that they often evoke a kind of nostalgia, though from a
personal rather than a 'pop' context.

>> Aren't field recordings as basic in content as a sinewave (or as
>> constructed)?


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