Friends - my friend Justin Hori has a really cool blog called heartyarts.com, and he was nice enough to post a sound piece I completed years ago; I am now excited to share it with you!
It was more or less what inspired my "yo" piece ("Sorry, Underground Hip Hop Happened 10 Years Ago (for Regan)"), and the story behind it is here:
Entitled "Goldwave" after the sound-editing program used to create it, this piece was conceived in 2003 while I was employed as a quality-control and customer service representative at a telephone-based dating service. My job entailed listening to thousands of low-quality recordings of eager singles describing themselves and the qualities they sought in their ideal mate, and then editing each for content and efficiency of space (i.e., removing the "uh"s and "um"s which spelled disaster for each caller). Through the repetition of hearing both the natural melody of our human voice and what was said with it- encompassing every cliché from "long walks on the beach" through bizarre and inappropriate sexual innuendos, as well as the recurring use of superfluous jargon like "you know what I'm saying"- I realized these 8-bit recordings shared a unique aesthetic and, coupled with their inherent ambient sounds (background noise, the clicks of disconnected calls, static, etc.), they became unconventionally, but indeed beautifully, musical. During work-time lulls, I began composing short rhythmic passages by editing percussive elements of the articulated consonants and aural clicks in the waveforms, and eventually incorporated a more complex use of spoken words and programming to create melody (repeating millisecond-long durations of noise generates audible tones, and you can vary their pitch by choosing smaller or larger samples as starting points). Some pieces are entirely additive and were made by combining audio from multiple enrollments, while one of my favorites (beginning at 0:15 in the left channel) was purely subtractive: I eliminated every discernable sound and phrase except for nervous faltering. I have included elements of 17 monaural songs, blending them together to create a stereo effect; no additional programming or alteration of the sounds was completed, thus maintaining the original, raw quality of the recorded media as well as each distinctive voice within it.