Cities And Memory

This piece was created in response to an archival field recording made by Louis Sarno among the Bayaka people of the Central African Republic. Instead of using the recording as musical material to be featured in the piece, I chose to use it as a generative constraint. I intended to have a single piece of audio from which the entire composition could be created. The original recording and its history also prompted me to think about listening as a form of attention. How sounds emerge from the environment, and how attention shifts as focus drifts. In this way, I imagine the piece resembling a strange forest which the listener passes through, encountering different sounds as they move on their way and attention drifts. All the sounds in the piece originate from the original field recording. I processed the recording through my modular synth, producing a new set of sounds that were then recorded into a DAW. My usual practice is to perform with the modular synth, recording the output as the finished work. However,