Samuel Thulin There to Hear : Placing Mobile Music
© Samuel Thulin
Les journées de la culture at OBORO
There to Hear: Placing Mobile Music investigates the process of listening to music while traveling around the city. The project examines tensions and interactions between the real and the imagined, the real and the mediated, the soundscape and music, everyday life and art, and the senses. Created entirely through the manipulation of field-recordings of a specific public transit route in the city of Montreal, the resulting 42-minute musical composition comes into contact with its origins as participants listen to the piece on an mp3 player while traveling along the route from which the field-recordings were made.
The route is comprised of 3 movements – walking, taking the bus, and taking the metro, which roughly correspond to three movements in the musical composition. The sounds used to create each movement of the musical composition were recorded during the corresponding movement of the route. However, as listeners travel along the route chance occurrences, such as a bus arriving 3 minutes earlier or later, result in an infinite variety of ways in which the music and the route combine. The way that sounds from the listener’s environment mix with their manipulated counterparts in the listener’s headphones also means that a new meta-composition – a “music-route” – emerges each time the piece is heard in context.
Create Your Own Composition
From September 25th to October 28th three sets of audio files will be available for download at www.oboro.net. Each set will be made up of three brief excerpts from the original field-recordings used to create the music route. Each set will also correspond to one of the phases of the route: a) taking the bus, b) taking the metro, and c) walking.
Select one of the sets of audio files and create your own composition using only the field-recordings contained in that set. Use any means you see fit to manipulate the field-recordings.
Free audio software for both Mac and PC can be found at audacity.sourceforge.net (basic) and at www.reaper.fm (more advanced).
A free listening event hosted by the artist will take place in Studio 1 of OBORO’s Media Lab on October 28th at 6 pm. Bring your compositions on an mp3 player, on CD, or on a USB key and they will be played back in an immersive sound environment. This event is open to everyone whether or not they contribute a composition.
© Samuel Thulin
Samuel Thulin is a researcher, musician and media artist living in Montreal. His work is concerned with concepts of mobility, place, and sound, as well as the history of media and technology. He is a member of the Mobile Media Lab and PhD candidate in the Communication Studies department at Concordia University.