:||digital kitchen||:

In this exercise we tried to create a sound track that would reflect both our experiences and contradictions between two different environments. The group for this assignment was Jeff Sable and me.
Jeff as a new yorker travelled to Nepal, and myself, a portuguese coming from the interior of the country to new york city.
We first went on a sound recording field trip dwelling in ny streets and subway, catching sounds from cars, walkers-by, closing doors and pretty much everything that got our attention.
Jeff had some beautiful recordings from Nepal, sacred chants that he chop and sequenced in garage band. As I had decided to sequence streets sounds i got my head on Ableton Live and Audacity.
To begin with i heard all the sound tracks collected and fixated some mental notes on which kind of sounds appealed more to my final sequencing, during this process i also started importing some sounds into audacity and playing around with selections. Exported some tiny samples to wave format to create my library.
Then I began to fiddle with Ableton Live, this was my first time and for a starter i've found its interface very straight forward and very coherent with its functions which helped me a lot to create this work.
After understanding the sound sequencing possibilities i had with the library created and Ableton Live i started the sequencing job trying to create a urban noise rhythm inspired by trains noises and arrhythmic sequences. The funny part is that i didn´t use any of the sounds captured in the subway! the chosen loops were captured from flags, walking shoes, closing doors and keys.
After I made my sequencing and Jeff had his track ready we tried to mix them as one. This was incredibly hard to do and most of the times didn´t work. So, we made the decision to breakup some of Jeff's loops and mix them with the street trains sequence. We tried to not use any filters and mix them with fading in and out some parts and trying to fill the sound and give some richness to what seemed a violent reaction to street sounds.
By the end of that mix we've chosen to apply one effect, we used a ping-pong delay to blend a small part of Jeff's Sol wa deb track featuring some horns.
As a conclusion: this was my first time editing and building soundtracks (also Jeff's), thus we found it very amusing and appealing I think we also felt a bit lost not only with the amount of possibilities but also with the need of a better knowledge of sound science.

here's the street-train-solwadeb track for our delight!