Cut & Paste - Editing the City's Voice

Here is a short experiment in which I have taken a number of the recordings i have made at Elephant & Castle and cut out all of the segments where instances of sounds with sharp attacks occur. These I have clumped together, and the sound files they are taken from are left with the gaps exposed.

Cut & Paste by AudioHive

These sonic punctuations and accents are for me, the real rhythm of the city sound scape, these are the sounds that break through the hum and get themselves heard. They remind me of watching wildlife documentaries where the explorers visit jungles, and all the animals that live there are screaming and shouting to communicate their presence, all with their own distinct calls.
By cutting and pasting these elements so that they all occur within a very short space of time, it's interesting that it becomes very difficult to establish the causal nature of these sounds, and in a tip to Pierre Schaeffer's desire for reduced listening, what I hear in these short bursts, now cut out of context with the narrative they naturally occurred in, are their sonic characteristics rather than their visual accompaniment. However, I do confess that I already know what was the cause of these sounds and as Michel Chion points out in his book Audio-Vision:

At the same time, Schaeffer thought the acousmatic situation could encourage reduced listening, in that it provokes one to separate oneself from causes or effects in favor of consciously attending to sonic textures, masses, and velocities. But, on the contrary, the opposite often occurs, at least at first, since the acousmatic situation intensifies causal listening in taking away the aid of sight. Confronted with a sound from a loudspeaker that is presenting itself without a visual calling card, the listener is led all the more intently to ask, "What's that?" (i.e., "What is causing this sound?") and to be attuned to the minutest clues (often interpreted wrong anyway) that might help to identify the cause.

Also, considering the sounds I produce will be to compliment the visuals in a film, this avenue of exploration is probably not beneficial becasue the audience will automatically create their own relationships and synch points between image and sound, even with the sound being asynchronous.

However, I do think that by editing the sounds in such a fashion, I can draw greater attention to their presence. Another interesting thing is that these sounds, when removed from the sound recordings, are not conspicuous by their absence, what is noticed is a pause, but you couldn't guess what was missing. That's an interesting thought about this experiment, I can remove and substitute sounds, and if delicately done, could construct a soundtrack, completely artificially. Hold on...more thought there, traditional movies do this all the time, their soundtracks are completely fabricated.