ds106: Playing with Sound

A typical home reel to reel tape recorder, thi...

A typical home reel to reel tape recorder, this one made by Sonora. It could play stereo quarter track tapes, but record only in one quarter track mono. Home equipment with missing features were fairly common in the 1950s and 1960s. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The assignment:

I will warn you right now: As a free agent, I may or may not follow the assignments in prisoner106 to the letter. You cannot fold, spindle, or mutilate me! Do not bend or stamp! I am a free man! With that said, I am getting deeper into the open source software Audacity.

I have used Audacity before to edit audio but not to build things with multiple tracks. It is an amazing process. It is to audio what making stained glass windows is to light. Or it is like making a mosaic. It is as easy to edit sound as it is to cut and paste text in MS Word. Now my example is pretty rudimentary, but I plan to keep going with this. My brothers and I used to do amazing things using portable reel-to-reel tape recorders back in the 60s and 70s and I would like to recover that spirit.

My how and why:

I think a critical part of understanding The Prisoner is the repetition and leitmotifs that occur throughout the series: there are phrases, sentences, words, gestures, snatches of nursery rhymes that all work together to create a self-interrogating sub-text throughout the series. I also hear echoes of Stanislavsky’s “questions for the actor” in the repetitions of “who are you?” and “what do you want?” I find techno to be one of those art forms that embraces repetition, recursiveness, and tessellations – the musical equivalent of the Alhambra.

My cheap ass version of that uses a public domain techno track that I found in Archive.Org edited down judiciously to three minutes and then layered over with clips that were taken from the opening of “The Arrival.”

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One Response to ds106: Playing with Sound

  1. John says:

    Blown away, just great, repetition & recursion nailed #ds106 style.

    I wish I could find something smart to comment, but sometimes you just have to cheer from the side lines.

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