A captive curve

"The source material for my submission to this most recent Cities & Memory call is a field recording by Shaye Thiel, a New York artist whose medium is sound, hearing, perception, and the practice of attention. She is hard-of-hearing and these sounds were recorded with her hearing aids. 

"I chose to work with and reinterpret Thiel’s field recording because I really loved the description of her art and work provided in her cv [https://shayethiel.com]. I encourage you to read it! I first started making ambient/minimal music as a way to address personal issues with tinnitus, insomnia, and anxiety. I really took Brian Eno’s “as interesting as it is ignorable” quote to heart, because that sort of liminal music had personally provided me a lot of relief. 

"I’m interested in creating music that isn’t necessarily musical; that uses barely perceptible elements to draw attention or distract it; in which heard sounds or rhythms might actually exist or might simply be created by the convergence of other sounds, the cancellation of frequencies, or who knows what. As Thiel puts it in her cv, sounds that are “entangled, co-created and in constant negotiation.” 

"My piece was entirely created and assembled in Koala Sampler on my iPhone. 

"All melodic elements, however simple or complex, have as their root the same single wave cycle, sliced from somewhere in the nineteen-minute recording. 

"Some of the rhythmic elements are samples from the recording, and some are random noises from Fractal Bits."

New York hearing aid soundscape reimagined by daddy fall down.