This playlist is a documentation of the sound of ambulant street vendors in Rio de Janeiro. These vendors drive around in Volkswagen vans (see the picture) and other vehicles around residential the city, and promote their wares through a speaker system. Each vendor has some unique way of announcing himself (the vendors were all men), screaming, rolling their r-s, et cetera. Below you can listen and download the sounds of the different vendors that passed in my neighbourhood. This is part of a research project I undertook at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation in 2020 and was financed by a CAPES grant ref 88887.387371/2019-00

Esta playlist é uma documentação da sonoridade dos camelôs ambulantes do Rio de Janeiro. Esses vendedores dirigem vans Volkswagen (veja a foto) e outros veículos residenciais na cidade e promovem seus produtos por meio de um sistema de alto-falantes. Cada vendedor tem uma maneira única de se anunciar (os vendedores eram todos homens), gritando, jogando seus r-s, etc. Abaixo você pode ouvir e baixar os sons dos diversos vendedores que passaram no meu bairro (Catete). Faz parte de projeto de pesquisa que desenvolvi na Fundação Getúlio Vargas em 2020 e foi financiado com bolsa CAPES ref 88887.387371 / 2019-00

Vendedores ambulantes/ street vendors in Rio De Janeiro

Insular Moments

Smetana's Solitude is a soundscape composition in four chapters. In this. composition, I imagine what Smetana might have heard and imagined during his stay in Pěčice (and Jabkenice). I made field recordings of four distinct categories (human activity, frogs, water, and birds) and dedicated a chapter to each category. I made collages out of the field recordings and further manipulated the sounds to symbolise Smetana's mental health problems and deafness. Through these health issues, I imagine he was not hearing the sounds in their natural way but rather imagined them. 
Smetana's Solitude was created during a month-long residency at the Cabin Studio in Pěčice, Czechia. The rural setting made it ideal to work with field recordings and experiment with hydrophones (to capture underwater sounds) and geophones (to record vibrations). 
The composition will be premiered at the Sanatorium Sonorum festival at the Cabin Studio on 24 August 2024. It is combined with a soundwalk around the cabin studio. I selected four places where I did significant recording activity. You can scan a QR code at each place to listen to each chapter. 
In a way, the walks between each chapter are part of the piece, as you will be hearing natural sounds around you. For those not at the Sanatorium Sonorum festival, I suggest listening to the 4 chapters during a walk in a forest near you.

Smetana's Solitude

The Song of Commerce project is a project that came into being as a way to unlock archival material from the historical collections in the John Rylands library in Manchester, United Kingdom. These collections span ancient Hebraic scripture rolls, nature gravures, and trading records from the Owen Owens & Son company. These trading records document the activities from the Owen Owens & son company, a mid-sized textile trading company in 19th -century Manchester. As John Owens was the founder of what later would become the University of Manchester, the records are kept in the John Rylands library.

Looking at the dataset, the most consistent data in there, were the dates of the sailings and their origin and destination. I chose to work with these data as it would allow me to create a kind of rhythm of the seas. Spread out over the course of half an hour, the sailing of the ships would be sounding through ship bells. I created this as a stereo work, to be listened to in an installation setting: people can walk by, listen to a part of it and continue their walk. 

Because the pandemic making public exhibitions difficult , I decided to make it available online. 

This project was financed with a Digital Humanities start-up grant from the John Rylands Research Institute. I thank the librarians for their help in accessing the archival records and digitizing the trade bills.

Image by By Philip John Ouless - collection, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=98344468

Song of Commerce

I wrote this piece for the 500th anniversary of the massive Sigismund bell in Krakow's Wawel Castle. 
In this piece, I first went to look for a source sound. I ran into two problems: there was not a ‘single’ stroke of the clock but only a sequence. As a result of that, you could hear the creaking of the wood when the bell moves. I decided to use those two problems as a strength and exploited these sounds.
The piece is supported by the low spectrum, stretched over the course of the piece and on top of that various transformations of the bell: I ran it through several filters, vocoders, and spatialised the piece in stereo. Sounds move from right to left, like the bell is swinging in the tower. The rhythmic sound is the creaking of the wood with the low spectrum removed. One small section is a filter on the bell sound, making it sound like somebody speaking unintelligibly. That refers symbolically to the words on the bell. The sound level is intentionally to the loud side. I wanted to ‘fill’ the space and the low drone certainly uses that headroom.

photo by Sensor, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=383585

Dzwon, Który Zmienił Brzmienie

This is part of a soundtrack for an unreleased horror movie

The Shadow

Goiaba/ guava

Vasoura/ brooms

Alho Graúdo/ Ground garlic

Ovos/ Eggs

Vendedor de camarão/ shrimp

This playlist contains recordings made during my fellowship in Rio de Janeiro in 2020. I noticed that the birds had a huge variety in sounds and wanted to record them. I got up early in the morning and let the recording run for up to three hours at a time. Besides bird sounds, you will also hear the odd Mico (a small monkey), as the general urban ambience like neighbours talking and vehicles passing.

Dawn Chorus, and People Going To Work

Another Dawn Chorus

This playlist contains the sonifications I did for the ComCiência AIR program in Belo Horizonte at the Museum for Mines and Metals. You can visit the project website (in Portuguese) at ocorodosminerais.com and read a detailed description of the project in English at

Tourmalina Elbaite

Spessartine

Quartzo

Hemimorfita

Hematite

Grafita

Crysoberyl

When I was in Ukraine last year, the sirenes to signal the ar alarm were very common. However, at the place where I was, the people had gotten used to the alarms and they did not fear the sound anymore. In a way, it was a subversion of the sound: rather than instilling fear, it became a background noise. With Sirena, I wanted to take a recording of an air raid alarm and completely morph it to take away its dangerous connotation. From the original sound, I explore various ways to transform the sound: simply sampling and transposing it, but also more extreme manipulations so to create a composition with multiple layers and stages.

Sirena

Ready for departure

A doublefaced track, moving between rhythmic acid-influenced sequences and sounds in a form of stasis.

Ricky Costello

This track started off as a techno track but I accidentally deleted most percussion sounds and was left with an eerie soundscape that I further worked out in what it has become. I might make a longer version of this in the future.

Out Of Sync

Do Santa Cruz

Smetana's Solitude is a soundscape composition in four chapters. In this composition, I imagine what Smetana might have heard and imagined during his stay in Pěčice (and Jabkenice). I made field recordings of four distinct categories (human activity, frogs, water, and birds) and dedicated a chapter to each category. I made collages out of the field recordings and further manipulated the sounds to symbolise Smetana's mental health problems and deafness. Through these health issues, I imagine he was not hearing the sounds in their natural way but rather imagined them. 
Smetana's Solitude was created during a month-long residency at the Cabin Studio in Pěčice, Czechia. The rural setting made it ideal to work with field recordings and experiment with hydrophones (to capture underwater sounds) and geophones (to record vibrations). 
The composition is combined with a sound walk around the cabin studio. I selected four places where I did significant recording activity. You can scan a QR code at each place to listen to each chapter. 
In a way, the walks between each chapter are part of the piece, as you will be hearing natural sounds around you. For those who are not at the Sanatorium Sonorum festival, I suggest listening to the 4 chapters during a walk in a forest.

Smetana's Solitude  - Chapter 4: Birds

Smetana's Solitude  - Chapter 3: Water

Smetana's Solitude  - Chapter 2: Frogs

Smetana's Solitude - Chapter 1: Humans

Quiet Storm: Music for Insects is a project in which I collaborate with the Spanish company ProTiberia to enhance the mating process of the Tenebrio Molitor beetle. The Tenebrio Molitor is a rich source of protein that has the potential to radically transform the agricultural sector by reducing its ecological footprint and lowering production costs.

The main challenge of the project is to optimize the beetles’ mating process so that farms can scale up their operations. I aim to use sound and vibrations to achieve this. The beetles can detect vibrations (and thus, sound) through tiny sensory hairs on their legs, and I hope that by providing sound stimulation, they will be encouraged to engage in mating more readily.

Beyond the scientific and economic dimensions, the artistic and poetic aspect of the project is equally important. I want to consider the beetles as sentient beings: creatures that deserve care and a good quality of life. By treating them well, I believe they will be happier and more inclined to reproduce.

This project is part of the S+T+ARTS Hungry EcoCities programme, which supports a number of art-science initiatives. I'm documenting the progress on my blog.

The Hungry EcoCities project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 101069990.

Samuel Van Ransbeeck

Pinned to spotlight

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