After Mamadu

This piece was created in response to an archival field recording made by Louis Sarno among the Bayaka people of the Central African Republic. Instead of using the recording as musical material to be featured in the piece, I chose to use it as a generative constraint. I intended to have a single piece of audio from which the entire composition could be created. The original recording and its history also prompted me to think about listening as a form of attention. How sounds emerge from the environment, and how attention shifts as focus drifts. In this way, I imagine the piece resembling a strange forest which the listener passes through, encountering different sounds as they move on their way and attention drifts. 

All the sounds in the piece originate from the original field recording. I processed the recording through my modular synth, producing a new set of sounds that were then recorded into a DAW. My usual practice is to perform with the modular synth, recording the output as the finished work. However, for this piece, I wanted to try working differently and to construct the piece out of the new sounds. I created 18 distinct stereo sounds, all from the same sample. I then listened back to them carefully and named each one based on how they sounded. Next, I grouped them into four categories based on shared qualities (for example, ambient textures, crackling or low-frequency elements).

I then started assembling the piece by imposing a set of compositional rules. No more than three sounds could play at once, and no more than two sounds from the same category could be used simultaneously. Early versions felt incoherent, but as I listened more and made changes, a sense of structure began to take shape. It was at this stage that I started to think about the idea of the piece resembling a forest with the listener slowly passing through. As the listener walks through this "forest", attention drifts between different elements, some inviting and others more unsettling.

The original field recording does appear briefly at the end of the piece, layered with itself, reversed, and time-stretched. While processed, it remains recognisable, functioning as a trace rather than a central feature.

In preparation for this work, I started reading Sarno’s book "Song from the Forest" and the documentary film of the same name. These materials informed my understanding of the context of the recording, whilst also reinforcing the decision to avoid direct representation and instead focus on response, transformation, and attentive listening.

Geedal (bow harp) in the forest with rain dripping reimagined by Richard Charles Boxley.

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Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds