Contribution short abstract:

This paper will present insights into our ongoing research on thinking about the world through sample-based synthesis and harmonic theory. By creatively and playfully re-cycling empirical data we are balancing the alleged rupture between imagination and real life in empirical research.

Contribution long abstract:

Sampling audio has become common, from voice messages to field recordings. These samples are often only used briefly and then discarded, becoming a form of sonic trash. As with other forms of trash, there is potential for recycling: Using techniques from sample-based synthesis we can loop field recordings as a method to re-cycle our sonic environments. By repeatedly looping a recorded sound and increasingly shortening the repetition window, we can create new auditory experiences as the recording transforms into audible waves that can be modulated, tuned, and harmonized. Using these new waves as starting points, we can synthesise alternatives to linearity, discontinuity, score and notation; shifting from environment to surrounding.

We engage in synthesis and sampling not only as an embodied practice but also as an analytical approach. By slowing down our engagement with field recordings through synthesis we are de-centering our agency by sending information into the loop. As Ingold remarked, notations and scores are standing for sound themselves, not concepts and ideas (2007:11). We experiment with the reversal: by re-cycling sound, a score emerges; we are co-creating in a more-than-human context ideas which harmonize with surroundings without neglecting discontinuities and disharmonies. Through synthesis, we are exploring the interplay between atomic resonances that clock the rhythms of our world and our human temporalities. Thus, by re-tuning sonic samples of our environments, we search for alternative cosmopolitical perspectives to the well-tempered concepts of modern science, while playfully breaking with and re-cycling those circles we critically see as being vicious.