Lost sounds

This type of music tends to challenge the distinction that is made in conventional musical practices between musical and non-musical sound.

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crochambeau
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Lost sounds

Post by crochambeau »

This morning I was taking apart a tape measure in an attempt to remedy a malfunction and the spring shattered/exploded.
tape-measure-failure.JPG
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The sound was like a metallic version of breaking a window. I was, of course, not capturing audio, so that instance is lost outside of the inspiration I took in.
tape-measure-shards.JPG
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I expect I will be finding little shards around the room for ages now.

Another lost sound I experienced was when airing up tires in a parts car in order to move it. The car was a shell, and the tires well past due. One tire began to bulge out the side, until it popped like a balloon - dropping the car onto the ground. Another very cool sound, etched in memory only.

What similar one shot auditory experiences have peppered your existence?
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Re: Lost sounds

Post by FAP »

My high school’s fire alarm had a distinct sound that I have yet to faithfully reproduce to this day… fun fact: that fire alarm was in a way responsible for my username (and a former noise project). I added the words “fire alarm” into a random phrase generator and one of the results was “fire alarm poet.” Eventually, Fire Alarm Poet got shortened to FAP and the name just sort of stuck; certainly FAP is far more blunt and unpretentious than Fire Alarm Poet, for better or worse.
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Re: Lost sounds

Post by NoiseWiki »

In my case the lost sounds was a reel to reel tape.. I've told this story before so pardon me if you know it already. Anyway my first year in art skool was at the Kansas City Art Institute. The year before I had started making qhat we called industrial music. At this point in time around 89 I had not gears the term noise or noise music .. although I had heard of the art of noise the band and musique concrete and Luigi Russolo etc.

Anyway there were alot of old houses around campus with estate sales and yard sales. One day I noticed a nearby church having one and I stopped by and this small handheld reel to reel caught my eye. Surprisingly with some new batteries it worked and the tape on had a recording. The first side was a bunch of random "field recording" like the owner was carrying it with him everywhere and getting little snippets of audio. One section was a woman repeating the phrase was my feet .. i guess was some kind of religious thing. The type also had this eerie whine to it from getting magnetized by sitting on the deck too long? But then on the flip side was the kicker.. the owner's girlfriend left a breakup message. Ot literally seem like she was jealous of the recorder and decided to seek her revenge by leaving the breakup message on the recorder.

I used a bunch of the audio for my experimental recordings and videos. One such video was part of my application to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Unfortunately I lost the original tape somewhere sling the way. In the wake of that I started collecting reel to reel tapes and found some decent material along the way.
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Re: Lost sounds

Post by RUBBISH »

Old kinda pinkish and tan tube reel to reel that worked as a neat guitar amp.
The motors didn't work so I never used it to play or record anything on tape.
But while using it as an amp for a guitar with a distortion pedel feeding back into the other stereo input(guitsr in the other) it apparently was broadcasting over CB radio. I was getting angry truckers from the very busy I-70 interstate less than a mile away yelling about the noise.
They could hear me and I could hear them....was the craziest thing and I could never get it to do that again.
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