# Non-music?



## Mark Harwood (Mar 5, 2007)

When I was a child, one of my favourite sounds was that of an extractor fan. A car also produces complex sounds for the mind to play with.
Electronics provide opportunities for sound generation, but can they tempt you away from "real" music-making?
Off-station radio sounds can be fascinating, don't you think? Putting them into an echo loop is a gas. 
Kraftwerk's "Radio-Activity" applies intelligence to the manipulation of these sounds. The recordings of "Pole" are based on the output of a faulty component, & I'm intrigued because they seem to reveal more discipline that the free-form group improvisations that I used to enjoy.
So, who else is into machine/electronic noise as a paramusical experience?


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## Rasa (Apr 23, 2009)

Musique concrete incorporates these elements.


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## Weston (Jul 11, 2008)

When I was much younger and had a reel to reel recorder with overdubbing capabilities, I enjoyed experimenting with concrete sounds. I had a very large rubber band, over two feet long, and would anchor one end to a post, stretch it and pluck it for bass sounds or pull a ruler across it for eerie cello-like sounds. Every kid plays with rubber band sounds, but this one sounded like some kind of cosmic alien bullfrog mating ritual. 

I found also that springs make interesting sounds when struck with a mallets. There were springs in our retractable ladder to the attic that made some intriguing echoing laser blast noises you hear in a lot of movies.

When computers came along and could sample sounds and manipulate them, I toyed again with these ideas for a short time, but by then I was too busy with an illustration career to do anything but play around.  

Maybe someday. . .


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## andruini (Apr 14, 2009)

This is something that has interested me for quite some time.. There's so many sounds out there that evoke so many things.. I have long been a fan of the work of sound artists..

Is anyone familiar with Alvin Lucier? He has a great piece called "I am sitting in a room" in which he records himself speaking, then re-records that recording playing back, then re-records the new recording playing back, etc. until the resonant frequencies of the room start taking over and ultimately make his speech unintelligible.. It's really fascinating.. You can hear it here: http://www.ubu.com/sound/lucier.html

There's another great sound artist I admire called William Basinski. He made a series of four albums called The Disintegration Loops, which are based on old tapes he had made, which had been so deteriorated by time, they made the most peculiar noises.. It's worth checking out, even if you don't listen to the four albums, haha..

I also like the work of Christina Kubisch, who experiments with Electromagnetic fields. She put out an album called "Five Electrical Walks", which is basically recordings of her walking around different cities, recording the electromagnetic frequencies of the city itself.. It's a fascinating experiment.

One of the most fascinating things I've come across is "The Conet Project", which is a four-disc set of recordings of shortwave radio number stations.. No one knows what these stations mean.. They're basically like that Lost show, where there's a loops being transmitted of numbers being read out over and over again.. Some people think it's a spy thing.. There's a bunch of theories, but it's really fascinating to listen to.. It can be oddly unsettling too, though.. Sometimes it's even the voice of a little girl saying the numbers.. It's all really macabre.. But fascinating in a non-musical way. You can download the four discs here: http://www.archive.org/details/ird059


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## danae (Jan 7, 2009)

How can anyone NOT be interested in such a play with sounds? I'm really interested but I'm also very lazy. I don't know anything about the technology of it. It's a pity, because, from what other friends-composers tell me, I only need a couple of good software programmes and a really good microphone, if a want to use sounds of the enviroment.


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## Rasa (Apr 23, 2009)

Rhe music that comes out of these experiments is usually mindnumbing to painful to the ears.


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## Mark Harwood (Mar 5, 2007)

Interesting stuff, thanks, especially to andruini.
On simple trick that I did 35 years ago was to play a (slightly shifting) ostinato on the guitar & record it on two machines, then playing them back together. They wander out of synch, an "echo" grows longer, & there is a sense of the room expanding.


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