Spanish Panoramas (2016, 8:45)
Spanish Panoramas is a fixed-media composition based on an earlier “fixed-with-live” version, "Spanish Panoramas – guided improvisations with SoundFisher", which was performed and accompanied live at the 2015 International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) Conference in Málaga, Spain.
The composition consists of three sonic characters or storylines: (1) an anecdotal story told through the arrangement of unprocessed field recordings collected across Spain; (2) an abstract line consisting of overlapping sounds that were conjured up from a personal sound database supporting a retrieval method known as “query by sound”; (3) a third character made up of processed recordings of flamenco guitarists. The weaving together of these three lines knits a unique and whimsical travelogue of Spain.
This fixed-media rendition is true to its more improvisational predecessor. The same vocabulary of sounds are used in both (see “acknowledgements” below). And both use the same “guide track” (storyline “1” above), however this fixed-media version better fed my cruel obsession with precision editing, and that makes the two renditions (live and fixed-media) very different.
Acknowledgements:
For some of the “anecdotal storyline” of the piece, I resampled field recordings of Spain that were contributed to
freesound.org, by the following users: 20020, 3bagbrew, antigonia, ariat, bram, carybarney, dobroide, falconbeard, kontest1, sergeeo, susoooo, and xserra.
©+℗ 2016 Thom Blum (ASCAP)