042 – Lost Souls


 
This piece was created for the 6th Disquiet Junto project. This week we had to use 3 Edison cylinder recordings to create a piece. This material is exciting to work with because they are from the dawn of recording technology.  We take listening to music on our stereos and iPods for granted now, but how exciting must it have been, being there when the first Phonographs were produced? Leonardo Da Vinci wrote that music was inferior to painting as an art, mainly because as it is created, it also dies. I wonder how he would feel if he lived in a time when we could capture performances and music with recording technology?
 
Of the 3 Edison cylinder recordings we were given to work with, the main one I used was ‘Rainbow Medley’, a recording from 1908.  I used the other two (Shimmee Town – Fox Trot and Angel’s Serenade) for their surface noises only, which became textures in my piece.  My processing for Rainbow Medley involved slowing it down around 30 times, achieved using Paul’s Extreme Sound Stretch.  I’ve wanted to try something like this ever since hearing the soundtrack for the movie ‘Inception’, where  Hans Zimmer used a slowed down version of an Edith Piaf song as the inspiration for his work.
 
I chose this picture I took of East Liberty Presbyterian Church to go along with this post.  It is a tall and sometimes foreboding structure in my neighborhood.
 
All audio selected from these antique cylinder recordings:
 
http://www.archive.org/details/colnyp-15132
http://www.archive.org/details/edba-3871
http://www.archive.org/details/ind-986
 
More details on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/
 


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