Sound and Music

Some notes on how sound and music would work in a local festival - such as the Finsbury Park Festival.

A drummer or guitarist or indeed any solo instrumentalist could perform somewhere in public - say a cafe like Blighty, or the Drum Club, or at the Ecology Centre and the performance is live stream to a (radio) studio.

At the studio other musicians mix an layer the performance with prerecorded sounds, or live instrumentation. The overall sound mix from the studio could then be sent out over the radio, or recorded for later editing and broadcast.

We could arrange a series of performances at spaces we have available - let's take the example of Newspeak House and the Ecology Centre as an example.

We create two Soundscapes, one of Santa Marta and South America, and another of Finsbury Park using samples of street sounds, and conversations in languages, and combine this with live instrumentation of a solo musician - broadcasting the result to remote locations.

This technique could be extended to work with soundscapes from Kafanchan or Ethiopia, or Paducah, Kentucky.

The sounds from the above instruments can be mapped to keyboards or stringed instruments and performed live together with effect. Sepcific touch screen interfaces (see Mobile Interface can be created that aloow navigation aroudn the sounds spatially.

We can use these soundscapes, and elements of the live sund performances as a recurring theme over the weekend in a local festival. individual samples (spoken word for instance), or short musical phrases can be used as a radio station jingle, or in the space that adverts might normally fill.

Is there a spoken word musical form that could naturally take the place of an advert? We can imagine shopkeepers, or locals with an issue, or poets and street interviews - the fragments that when mixed together create a sonic landscape being used to create the equivalent of a 30 second advert. Perhaps one particular interview would be foregrounded? Would this work?

We know that plain adverts from local shops can work really well - is there a format which is more composed and musical effective?

Moving sonically from one space to another could be facilitated sonically using a Sound Journey where we move from one soundscape to another. Simply by lining up live DJ's or Spotify Playlists and prerecorded DJ segways we can look to introduce simple short DJ performances.

We need an inoffensive playlist style soundscape for cafés to play. This is probably best done by collecting music playlists in advance.

For this reason thinking of the radio performance over the weekend in terms of a number of layers and minimising / optimising the nature of liver performances may work best.

Not sure what the name is for this sort of performance, but instead of just using effect pedals, the performer could rely on their riffs coming back over the radio with a delay - they could then perform on top of that, all though this would be difficult for more than a single layer.