As I have been busy the past few days adding content to the sounds found project, I’ve become increasingly sensitive to the sounds around me. One of the things that recording often forces you to do is to stop and sit for a few minutes while you get some of the sounds down, so I’ve been spending the time listening carefully to what sounds get captured. Or in any given situation, I’ve become very aware of what sounds around me might get me to hit record. Highly worthwhile activity.

As for the project itself, there are now 20+ recordings free for the taking, in my esteem a good number to lend the whole thing a bit of momentum.

I’ve started a new thing here at Intelligent Machinery called the sounds found project.

The basic idea is that I’ll be dropping miscellaneous field recordings I’ve captured with my trusty iRiver and Sony microphone into the public domain. I’ve been looking here and there on the web for audio sources for music projects, too often everything comes with the requirement for attribution. For instance, I’ve always liked the idea of the Freesound project, but it has become dominated by the idea that everyone deserves and expects credit, and that’s just not where my interests lie. So I’ve decided to put up instead of just griping about it, and all of these recordings come with absolutely zero strings attached. Sell them if you want, call them your own, it doesn’t matter to me.

I don’t have anything against acknowledging the efforts of others, but it can be a challenge to keep track of where audio originated, and frankly I think it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if people didn’t require credit for everything they do. Just do something for the joy of it and share once in a while, it’ll do you a world of good.

The recordings themselves are fairly rough, basically just me hitting record in a given place and letting it run for a few minutes. They are filled with buzzes and hums and bumps and pops and clicks. My hope is that they’ll be useful source material for some, and simply enjoyed as glimpses of places by others.

I’ve put five recordings up so far–two from yesterday, three from today–and I’ll be adding more on a regular, if not exactly daily, basis.

I’d like to eventually set it up so that others can add to the repository, but I’m sure that would require some kind of legal prep work to ensure everything goes effectively to the public domain. So for now it’ll just hold stuff that I’ve recorded.

So the March edition of the monthly noise-free-for-all took place Saturday evening. The event was quite a bit of fun, lasted a little over two and a half hours and featured a good ten or twelve participants. And it was pretty noisy.

Unfortunately, through some kind of a technical error, the whole event wasn’t all recorded for the downloadable mp3 as it has been in previous months. Our man Mystahr, however, was able to record a good portion of the event (roughly the last 90 minutes) and has mixed it down and chopped it up into an album of 10-minute chunks of easily digestible scree.

Fun way to listen back to it, as it omits the occasional lull and false starts in between momentum shifts that happen in such events. Click here to get the collection. Mind some of the audio stoppages on tracks 3&4, though, I think Mark was having some on again/off again troubles with bandwidth for a while. There were so many of us on-line, we may have taxed Ninjam more than it could bear.

Thinking about something Intelligent Machinery chairman John Ingram brought up, I wonder if there is much of an audience for music available free on the web?

Certainly when discussing music with others, few people mention much in the way of free music or things they are listening to from netlabels. I have to wonder if the glut of free music is too much for most listeners? And those brave enough to venture out toward free music have so much to choose from that they move on fairly quickly to something new?

Even many net radio stations–Stillstream.com for example–which used to play primarily free music, seems to play significantly less now. Are most folk too accustomed to the label/radio/shop/television as filtering mechanism, that they just aren’t interested in listening to something they might not like in order to find something that they might? I’ve heard a lot of terrible free music on the web, sure, but I’ve also heard some of my absolute favourite music, too.

I have a feeling tapping into the mechanisms of commerce might be a surer way of finding a mainstay audience than putting up a “free music” sign, as perverse as that may seem. It’s only a feeling though, can’t say I know if going commercial would be of much use either, given the stories I’ve heard from folk who do try to sell their stuff.

Strangely, while I listen to lots of free music on the web, I listen to less now than I used to, and listen to a lot more things I’ve downloaded through my subscription with eMusic. So it seems I, too, am under the sway of commerce, programmed sheep-like along with the rest of the world.

New SIGHUP release today, Edison Moon:

This is so far my favourite thing I’ve made. It’s a reflection of everything I like music to be and it’s my small contribution to the plunderphonic artform.

The project has been in the works for six months or so, I had come across the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project curated at the University of California, Santa Barbara and was simply in awe of the contents of the library. Through some technicalities in copyright law, it is assumed that the Edison wax cylinder recordings are in the public domain, so the library has graciously transferred the collection of recordings and placed the raw transfers on their site for download. The collection is very deep, and well worth browsing thoroughly.

While I was looking it over for the first time, I accidentally came across several songs with the word “moon” in the title. Struck me as a sort of quaint ephemera, when popular songs had lots of moonlights, and gardens and sweethearts, so I started searching to see just how many moons I could find, and the idea for a full project was born shortly afterward.

I had played around with several of the recordings and built up a good stock of materials for a set of tracks, but in creating the tracks nothing was particularly cohesive. So I sat on the idea, did several other things in the interim, including my Kenji Siratori track and the Drum Machine EP, and once I came back to it, it all fell into place fairly quickly. I think I finisehd all five tracks in under two weeks.

I have plans to do more projects from the wax cylinders.

Click on the picture above to go to the release page. I wouldn’t recommend the lo-fi files that can be accessed through the player, go straight for the high-quality VBR recordings instead. I’ve listed there the eight recordings that comprise all of the source materials used on this project. I think my approach to the original material is both reverential and perverse, I hope it is perceived as such by listeners.