Blue Lines Revisited: rocketsandrayguns: “We looked at how we had constructed some of our..."

tomewing:

rocketsandrayguns:

"We looked at how we had constructed some of our more unusual songs, and a lot of them were made from concrete music, found sounds, and we looked at what we had explored in the past and we were trying not to repeat ourselves, and, well, we've done trains; we've done machinery. And then I actually said to myself "I realise now that everything that we've sampled from the real world – trains, machines, computers, guns, typewriters – they were actually accidental". The audio that we had sampled was a waste product from the specific design function of whatever it was that we had recorded.

Let me clarify that: a typewriter is designed to type things onto a page, not make a clicking noise when you hit the key. A steam engine is not designed to go 'chuff chuff'. That’s an audio waste product of the inefficiency of its engine. And as the world has modernised, the accidental audio by-products, waste products, of the things that have become concrete music are going to be less and less because the designers have designed out the waste so that the machinery of the modern world has actually become more silent."

— OMD’s Andy McClusky, The Quietus interview

I trimmed the quote a bit to zoom in on this really interesting point about “audio waste”

Me, in the Village Voice (1999):

Back 40, 60, 70, 80, 100 years ago, when sound recording was growing up, engineers were realizing that there was no way the tape could capture what the ear heard, so the task became not just to record a sound but to make one — this is true even back when the basic tools were only microphones, space, and walls. The task is to put on tape a vocal sound that you like or an instrumental sound that you like whether or not it corresponds to how the voice and instrument sound anywhere else. But along the way, something interesting has happened. Some sounds are electric — that is, they sound electric or electronic, they signify "electric" or "electronic." I mean, although the whole thing is electric — all of recording and most live performance pass through electrical impulses — only some sounds register as electric to the ear. And paradoxically these are the sounds that arise when the electronic device doesn't function as originally intended. E.g., the electric guitar is quintessentially electric not when the electric amplifier merely amplifies the guitar but when it distorts the guitar sound or produces feedback screech. And "techno" dance music seems most electronic and technological and futuristic when it sounds like the future sounded back when the future was new — back 50 or 70 years ago, back before the devices worked very well, back when loudspeakers sounded tinny and you heard extra crackle and pop. Or back in '50s–­'60s sci-fi films, when computers had to blink and beep when they were trying to think, and robots spoke in weird mechanical tones, as if the future had no idea how to give these machines rich voices.

Inserted in spots on one track of my mystery CD are some distant indecipherable talking and barely hearable "orchestral" music that are perhaps meant to sound like they're coming through a radio — or that may actually have come through a radio. And the reason I think of a radio is that the voices are embedded far in the distance, which my ear interprets as "bad reception." If the "reception" had been good, I wouldn't have heard "radio," just voices and orchestra. Even if they had come through a radio.
--Frank Kogan, excerpt from "Hums And Hisses," review of platEAU's spacEcakE, Tues. Oct 5, 1999

(I want to link Mark's Noise piece but pitas is temporarily down while changing servers.)