Season 2 / Week 3 / Day 13 Wednesday: Turning the environment into music

Good morning!

How are you feeling today?

We hope that you don’t start the day feeling too blue… Because today, we will go on and explore that peculiar space where field recordings are turned into music.

Paul Paulun - our sound archeologist shares with us a lot of very interesting references about artists who turn the sounds of their environment into music.

He speaks about the “genre” where field recordings serve an artistic purpose in our Ambient Radio Podcast No. 6!

The first reference brings us as far back in time as 1948. Pierre Schaeffer with his approach called “musique concrète” . Listen here to his “Etude Aux Chemins De Fer.” Schaeffer based his music on recordings and worked with audio tapes. He did not only introduce a new type of music, but he also “dissolved” the border between composer and interpreter….

And this is where we are heading with Ambient Radio this week - you are the composer of the music you find “out there” but you are also the interpreter creating a very special mood...

Image by: Semitransgenic at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9723982

In our podcast, Paul Paulun shares a lot of other interesting thoughts and references about artists. We share the links to the pieces he discusses also here in our letter!

If you have time and want to get some more inspiration - we invite you to listen to the following pieces and travel through the history of field recordings!

Let’s start in 1986 with Graeme Revell and his Dance of Shadows.

Holger Hiller collected sounds in Tokyo – Busy Loudspeakers In Shinjuku (1995)

Battery Operated - a band from the Netherlands come uo with – Chase Through 8 (2000) Radio Boy aka Matthew Herbert created – Starbucks Is Coming (2001)

The same artists also created a track called – The End of Silence (2013). The latter is quite a disputed one - to know more about it - listen to our podcast!

Although we ended silence - we will try to keep tranquillity… Maybe today, you have to go back to last week’s place full of calm and quietness…

We would like you to pick out the sounds that you lose yourself in...sounds of tranquil, of comfort and ease...

By now, it is time to make a step from composer to interpreter (and maybe back again….?) This time, we don’t only record from start to stop, but this time, you create a tranquil mood based on your recordings….

Please share your sound and an image with us:

• Post a film / recording (around 1 minute in length) with an image on Instagram using the #moodscapesound #ambientradio (like this, we find your work!) or:

• Also please upload your sounds on Google drive. Please give your track the following title: moodscapesound_yourplace_yourname_3. Like this we find your work for the weekly remix! or

• Alternatively, drop an audiofile into our Telegram chat!

We are very much looking forward to getting lost with you within your quiet, soothing and relaxing soundscapes …

Happy that you are here!

Love and Kisses, Pan, Delia and the whole Ambient Radio Crew!