I recently composed this piece for my Music and Media Technologies course at Trinity, and I thought it would be nice to showcase it here. “Walking Home Simulator” is an ambient soundscape written for my Electroacoustic Composition 1 module. For this project, I was challenged to take field recordings in and around Dublin and create a hybrid acoustic-electronic piece that manipulated this original source material to create a tension between realism and surrealism. In “Walking Home Simulator”, I explore concepts of homesickness, belonging, and the conditions that prompt the development self-identity. These themes are very important to me as an artist, but this exercise was an opportunity for me to explore them in an avant-garde style. Unlike my usual work, this is not a pop song or a folk song: it’s an experimental soundscape, and a slow burn to boot. So you’ve been warned! 😉 Program note and audio file attached below.
Walking Home Simulator.
Title Screen
→ Settings
→ Set Walk Time => Abridged
→ Main Menu
→ Run Simulation
Text Bubble:
“Walk Until You Find A Spot That Feels Like Home. Collect the Feeling of Home.”
This composition was developed by cutting, pasting, sampling, editing, and combining excerpts from a large 2-hour recording of a walk from Dublin City Center to Phoenix Park. All sounds featured in this project were recorded on a mid-side stereo microphone pair inside a Zoom H2n recorder.
Dublin is a long way from where I call home. There’s a lot of noise, a lot of people, a lot of *stuff* going on. Every surface and object has a complex sense of function and form. Crammed onto every city block are eight different buildings of nine different architectural styles, each with ten sounds and smells emanating from eleven storefronts or apartment windows.
The one thing there isn’t a lot of in Dublin is… nothing. There’s a distinct lack of still, innocuous, unremarkable nothing. The only one place in the city you can find unadulterated nothing is out in the middle of Phoenix Park. I think that’s why I’m so drawn to the space. Phoenix Park is so huge that it still contains little fragments of undeveloped places. And I don’t mean “undeveloped” in the conventional sense. I mean it in a perceptual sense. There are places in Phoenix Park that are unacknowledged, unconsidered, and wholly unremarkable, simply because nobody’s gotten around to considering them. Back home in Alabama, there’s “nothing” everywhere. Even in the South’s large metropolitan areas, you have to drive through a lot of nothing to get somewhere to do something. Little in-between spaces on your way to work. Long patches of highway median on the commute from Birmingham to Tuscaloosa.
So, this composition is dedicated to nothing. More broadly, it’s dedicated to the little things that feel like Home… the ones that are impossible to search for, because they’re impossible to define. But sometimes you get lucky and find one.
(headphones recommended)