fixed media and live processing
Duo Apartment D with Ingibjörg Friðriksdóttir
WeSound is a twelve-minute composition that represents the sound of our social network. It is created entirely by asking friends to provide audio samples on social media - anything from spoken word, singing, instruments to even interesting noises found in the environment. The result is a chaotic mess with the words forming interesting rhythmic patterns. Fascinating, addictive, warm, and sometimes overwhelming.
We experienced becoming ‘out of sync’ with the social media of their home countries - Iceland and China - due to the timezone differences. This is used in the piece by representing each hour of the day as 30 seconds in the exactly 12 minute composition. As the social media becomes busier, so the composition mirrors this intensity, with the samples of Iceland and China fading in and out over the piece based on the connection with the time of day represented.
A particularly interesting audio consequence of using social media is that the words from the different languages and cultures represented stick out, and can resonate with listeners at different level depending on their ability to understand the languages. Listeners do not have to understand the spoken words in order to follow the sonic world revealed in this piece. Iceland and China is represented by unprocessed samples but the US is represented by real-time processed samples. The piece includes fixed media, improvisation and live processing in MaxMSP and Ableton Live.