It gets me thinking, Drones are the sound of structures of notes, repeated on a long harmony, and have been widely used by cultures. Now, the effect these transmit and why they attract me, is that of ethereal rhythms, longer than life, and existing in nature for us to capture them by modifying our perception of time.
With these ideas in mind I came to try some processing of sounds to bring to life sounds that comply with the perception of this natural occurring long rhythms.
While thinking about the sound of languages, and how they play a major part on the form of the cultures and personality of countries sharing the same tongue, I also stopped on the question of what the sound or rhythm of the entire human language phenomenon would be. I think of the persistence of time, and what it looks like from afar.
[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/83624225″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
So, taking recordings that would show the typical sound of English, Spanish, Italian, Polish, French and Dutch, the languages I have been closer to (although I couldn’t find a proper recording for Lithuanian, sorry Liucija!), I mixed them all in Max/MSP, changed and looped them, changed their speed, applied LPFs and tweaked the parameters and bit-depth of the outcome. All this until I could find that organic like point that induced me into thinking about what the nature of the sound of languages and their significance, similarities and evolution.
The work is still to be further studied and explored though. Here is one of the outcomes, the link redirects to another website where the track is streamed.