The horn sounds like this

"The horn sounds like this" originates from a December 1966 reel tape recording featuring musicologist Jeremy Montague demonstrating various horns. The 30-minute document represents a specific moment in museological practice: a scholarly voice explaining before sounding, contextualising before experiencing.

Rather than preserving the integrity of this material, Francesco Ganassin and Sergio Marchesini chose the path of creative betrayal. Montague's voice and the demonstrated horn sounds are subjected to a process of corruption that reveals hidden dimensions while obscuring others. The horn demonstrations bleed into one another, traveling through layers of digital memory that fail and distort. The narration fragments and becomes repetition and then texture. 

"The horn sounds like this" lives through sonic paradoxes. It is elementary as the sound production techniques of the horns themselves, urban as the background noise of a nocturnal city, minimal as a badly-tuned radio transmission, truculent as a piece heard halfway through by two musicians coming home from a concert on a humid night, when exhaustion opens unexpected spaces of sound. The result is a conscious aberration, a dirty listening that glorifies, by betraying, the sound of a horn traveling through time to a broken device of the future.

The document's processing is realized through DzigaLoop, a one-of-a-kind digital device built on Bela board, conceived in 2020 and custom developed for this project. DzigaLoop here functions as a tape looper that contaminates and destabilises sounds, creating a dialogue between two generations of tape-based practices: the archival recording and contemporary digital looping with its inherent aleatory processes.

Trumpets and horns reimagined by Francesco Ganassin and Sergio Marchesini.

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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