Tech experiments + Audio Piece

Regularity in time and space can be broken by heterogenous reverbs and shimmering delays. Dubs originally existed in a specific place. Delays were placed on tracks that related to the size of the soundsystem. [Henriques, 2018]



Osbourne Ruddock, known widely as King Tubby, famously fractured well known songs and then rebuilt them into dubs for his soundsystem to help create dub reggae. [Chude-Sokei, 2015] Tubby tailor made delays and reverbs for his soundsystem so that they could bend and mold the space within the soundsystem’s speakers. Tubby combined the familiar with the hyper-specific into an uncanny hybrid which was specific to a space. This uncanny space was and still is a site of dreaming, where breathing is possible.



For more information see:

Michael Veal, 2007. Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae



I decided to respond to these techniques and experiment with deconstructing and reconstructing the familiar sound of breathing. I experimented with inputting my own breathing at different points in the day and in different moods, adjusting the speed and pitch of the breaths to extremes.



Steady breathing slowly formed into a growling sub-bass.  High-frequency breathing morphing into the sounds of birds. The outcomes of these experiments were channelled into an audio piece I created  in collaboration with Gazelle Mba. The piece draws from multiple black sonic histories and combines them with sounds of breathing. This piece follows Sylvia Wynter’s conception of poetics as an act of creative, anti-capitalist production.



I created a granular synth in openframeworks to research into the sonics of breathing. I chose granular synthesis as my tool because of its ability to [de]structure and create hybrid sound from samples. My plan was to use this as a performance tool in a communal breathing practice.

for more about this practice check:
http://doc.gold.ac.uk/compartsblog/index.php/work/my-bitrot-gut-weed-breath/



References:
Chude-Sokei, L., 2015. The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics. Wesleyan University Press.



Henriques, J., Echo. In Michael Bull, ed. The Routledge Companion to Sound Studies. Routledge, pp. 275-282



Batty, J., LiveAudioGranularSynthesis-Maxim

https://github.com/JoshuaBatty/LiveAudioGranularSynthesis-Maxim