That's Fine For Merlin (suite)

Masa ("Mass") is a sound collage made with feld recordings from my personal archive along with a free adaptation of the poem “Masa”, by César Vallejo (Peru) and the expanded violin by Alexandre Sacha Sakharov (France). This audio piece is part of the compilation project “New Chronologies of Sound”, a collection of sound works based on field recordings, that proposes to generate a sonic debate around the emergence of a new perceived time axis due to the global pandemic landscape: https://lifeisavicnic.bandcamp.com/album/new-chronologies-of-sound

A research study published in 2018 revealed that sound waves carry mass, in particular, negative mass (Esposito, Krichevsky, Nicolis). This mass, in the presence of a gravitational feld, such as that of the Earth, forces its trajectory upwards. Sound waves would therefore be a form of antigravity. These ideas made me think about the absence of those gravitational and vibrational fields. During 2020, these sound waves have disappeared or decreased due to the pandemic situation: sounds of people gathering, choirs, protests, noise of enthusiasm and euphoria, the big and small concerts, even the funerals in community. I miss this crossed map of crowds in unison, a diverse, porous and powerful multiple unison. I began to rescue those mass vibrations from my personal recordings, reliving and following what Séan Street refected in The Sound of a Room:
 “With sound, I am reimmersed in the moment, living it again through the time it took to happen in the first place. It is that slow revelation of identifcation that is an essential part of the experience of a recording, setting it in the memory”.

First Prize Grand Prix Nova International Radio Drama festival, Bucharest 2021
First Prize UK Radio Drama Festival, Canterbury 2022
Recordings, voices, edit and mix by Laura Romero Valldecabres. Mastered by Lawrence English.
Curator(s): Hugo Branco, director of VIC Aveiro Arts House and curator of the project “New Chronologies of Sound” by the Aveiro Municipality via Teatro Aveirense,Portugal; and Jorge Barco (MAMM — Museum of Modern Art of Medellín, Colombia) as curatorship consultant. 

Video with English subtitles (translation by Juande Blasco): https://vimeo.com/573475852

New Chronologies of Sound

"Masa" (Mass). New Chronologies of Sound. Grand Prix Nova Award / UK Radio Drama Award

25 free Ableton Live piano and synth racks designed for genres like House, EDM, Pop, Hip Hop, Cinematic.

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FOUNDATION: KEYS [Free Ableton Live Instrument Pack]

A little bit of something that began when I played the wrong note in a chord...

Nostalgic Vibes

Sophie is the best. Song made entirely from field-recorded clips from Kickstarter video footage.

Feat: stick on fence, ukulele loops, cars, camera snaps, thorn crunches, rope on flagpole, wind, flipped toy piano, Sophie and Jason

What does it mean to be red?
And what is the nature of a bend in the road?
And where were the colours born,
When light found them in the early morn?

Talk to me about spaces,
And we can invent places out of mirrors and thorns,
Lets make funny faces
And music with our flies on scooters and horns


Sun Song for Sophie

Been hearing this type of thing in my head for decades. Wasn’t really able to get it out.
Chet Singer’s Silverwood tenor sax ensemble for Reaktor allows me to reach there.
https://www.native-instruments.com/en/reaktor-community/reaktor-user-library/entry/show/12419/

Inner Voicing

This “song of the Ottawa” is a digital data sonification of the hydrometric data collected at the foot of Rideau locks from 1880-1977. While daily measurements are available for much of this period, I chose to use monthly mean data to limit the size of my dataset, and to foreground the river’s seasonal shifts. Learn more about my Master's research project at www.songsoftheottawa.ca

Hearing the River's Flows

This "song of the Ottawa" tells the story of boat traffic from the urban Ottawa river downstream past Kettle and the Duck Islands to Besserer’s Grove. I elected to sonify the trips back and forth of three boats whose schedules I could determine over the course of a single week in July of 1912. Learn more about my Master's research project at www.songsoftheottawa.ca

On the Water

During my 2020 residency at the Library of Congress, I developed Citizen DJ (https://citizen-dj.labs.loc.gov/) to invite the public to make hip hop music using free-to-use sounds in the Library’s vast collections. During this time I also created my own album using Citizen DJ which remixes a Library collection called Inventing Entertainment: The Early Motion Pictures and Sound Recordings of the Edison Companies (https://www.loc.gov/collections/edison-company-motion-pictures-and-sound-recordings/about-this-collection/) which contains early sound recordings on Edison Diamond Discs published between 1912 and 1929.

This track samples "Old pal (Why don't you answer me?)" by M. K. Jerome (1893-), Herbert Soman (performer), and Daniel Lieberield (performer) published in 1921. https://www.loc.gov/item/00694035/

The full album: https://soundcloud.com/functionfoo/sets/some-tracks-from-the-stacks

Inner Voicing

SynthBreath