Electroacoustic work with sampled toy instruments.
Duration: 3' 38" — 2020
Objects as Instruments
Toys is an electroacoustic work built entirely from the recorded sounds of found objects: a toy piano, a toy drum, a corrugated tube, a melodica, a tin spinning top, and bicycle bells. It was also my first encounter with electroacoustic composition — made during Francesco Ortica's course at the Conservatorio Bonporti in Trento, and presented at the final examination to a panel that included Mauro Graziani.
Each object was recorded with a Zoom H4n Pro at 24-bit/96,000 Hz, then processed in Adobe Audition through a dense series of transformations: extreme time stretching, pitch shifting across multiple octaves, chorus and band-filtering, reverse playback, heavy compression. The material was then composed and mixed in Pro Tools. What emerges is not a catalogue of recognisable timbres but a continuous sonic landscape where the origin of each sound gradually dissolves — the familiar made strange, the domestic made abstract.
Technical details
Duration - 3' 38"
Type - Electroacoustic / Acousmatic
Year - 2020
Sound sources - Toy piano, toy drum, corrugated tube, melodica, tin spinning top, bicycle bells, apothecary mortar
Recording - Zoom H4n Pro, 24-bit / 96,000 Hz
Processing - Adobe Audition (time stretching, pitch shifting, chorus, filtering, reverse)
Mixing - Pro Tools