A past flown past
Mar 23, 07:09 PM
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"Cultural heritage can be a strange one, as it can range from mass cultural significance to something on a more personal level. This sound spoke to me for many reasons on a more personal level. I grew up in South London so didn't really go to a lot of the "tourist" areas of London, as they were just somewhere we could reach in an hour on the train, they were not going anywhere. The Tower had been around for hundreds of years so there was no rush. It wasn't until I moved to the north of the UK and had a family that we had a reason to visit a lot of tourist attractions with our son.
"It wasn't until I started working on this sound that I remembered I got to visit the Tower of London when I was younger as a friend was related to a chaplain who lived at the property. We got to walk around the grounds after dark, bringing a very different experience to the full on cacophony of sounds that you would hear in the daytime. Another angle that resonated with me was the sound of the tour guide themself. A good tour guide is there to bring the history to life, something that really came across in the recording, There way they can swap the flow and personality of the story, connecting with and bouncing off the audience, managing to keep everyone interested, involved and on their toes.
"For my remix, I started off with cutting up the voices in the audio and forming an electronic beat from these fragments, I got something pretty good together before deciding to scrap that and just play the audio raw and respond to that. The synth lines were all played live against the original file. I then started adding effects to the original audio and a few edits to represent the way that you never know what a tour guide is going to come out with. The tiny flashes of a beat and the acid line that weaves in at the end I felt represented the history of my version, much as, even though the audio focuses on the tour guide the history of the tower shines through in his words. I felt his description of the tower not only brings the history to life, but the recording freezes his retelling of that history in an important capsule in as just an important way."
Tower of London tour guides reimagined by DFF Sound System.
———————
This sound is part of the Sonic Heritage project, exploring the sounds of the world’s most famous sights.
Find out more and explore the whole project: https://www.citiesandmemory.com/heritage
"It wasn't until I started working on this sound that I remembered I got to visit the Tower of London when I was younger as a friend was related to a chaplain who lived at the property. We got to walk around the grounds after dark, bringing a very different experience to the full on cacophony of sounds that you would hear in the daytime. Another angle that resonated with me was the sound of the tour guide themself. A good tour guide is there to bring the history to life, something that really came across in the recording, There way they can swap the flow and personality of the story, connecting with and bouncing off the audience, managing to keep everyone interested, involved and on their toes.
"For my remix, I started off with cutting up the voices in the audio and forming an electronic beat from these fragments, I got something pretty good together before deciding to scrap that and just play the audio raw and respond to that. The synth lines were all played live against the original file. I then started adding effects to the original audio and a few edits to represent the way that you never know what a tour guide is going to come out with. The tiny flashes of a beat and the acid line that weaves in at the end I felt represented the history of my version, much as, even though the audio focuses on the tour guide the history of the tower shines through in his words. I felt his description of the tower not only brings the history to life, but the recording freezes his retelling of that history in an important capsule in as just an important way."
Tower of London tour guides reimagined by DFF Sound System.
———————
This sound is part of the Sonic Heritage project, exploring the sounds of the world’s most famous sights.
Find out more and explore the whole project: https://www.citiesandmemory.com/heritage