OrdScape Kitchen

The idea for the Fort Ord soundscape spawns from a memory I had recently. I went out on a bike ride to explore about 10 months ago and ended up out in the abandoned barracks hidden in the hills of the old army base, right on the shore of Monterey Bay. These “caves” are 30’ wide, 50’ long, and a 20’ dome ceiling, giving it a tunnel shape that is closed on both ends. There are about ten of them and they are completely empty. I walked inside and clapped because I just knew it had to sound cool. I found that the room’s reverb lasts at least 10 full seconds with any decently loud transient. I instantly knew that when I went in there and heard the rooms sound, I wanted to record something there someday. The electronic music assignment of composing music from sounds recorded on Fort Ord was just the thing to use. The cave, and sounds from my kitchen on the fort as well, ended up being the perfect blend that I needed for sounds that I had imagined for this project. I wanted to capture the sound of my everyday life living on the fort. In my process not one musical instrument was used, and 22 non-musical sounds were voiced into musical instruments. Our main goal was to advance the unapparent rhythmic properties of non-musical found sounds. We followed Stockhausen’s process of Structured time, splitting sound, multi-layered spatial composition, and tonal equality. We also incorporated the 7 traits of electronic music. I wanted a truly industrial timbre with some of the snare drum sounds I was thinking of, inspired by Shaeffer and Stockhausen’s making sense of the world’s everyday industrial qualities. Inside this particular cave, there was what appeared to have been a piece of roof from and old shack, a wavy metal type roof. This piece was old and rusty. I grabbed a stick, hit it one time fairly hard and let it fully decay before making any unwanted noise that may be recorded. I also dropped it, and dragged it. These became the 2 industrial snare drums. I walked around and looked for other things to throw inside and came up with a rock, piece of tile, a heavy metal pipe, and a piece of animal bone. These were used as glitch noises. My footsteps were recorded in the building when moving around. The pigeons up at the top inside became unnerved, hooted and flapped. Both of those were used for spatial atmospheric effects. I cleaned off the grille of the mic with my hand and that was used as a record scratch sound. From the kitchen we used the dishwasher and garbage disposal, which are representative of industrial synth noises. Grains of rice and sugar were dropped on a metal cookie sheet and used as hi hats. The depressing and release of a toaster was recorded for a spring sound. The ignition on the stove was recorded as a click instrument. A microwave beep was put into Ableton Live in a sampler and spread out a MIDI controller. We backed off the attack to give it a soft hit, then added reverb and delay and played variations of a G major chord. My foot accidentally bumping into the oven and tapping my shoe on the ground became the kick drum sounds. Overall we recorded about 45 minutes of material and condensed it down to 4. We chose the best sounds, which were all one-take-wonders! So what we had was what we got, and I think it was used well. This piece of music definitely ended up capturing the soundtrack of my typical daily life here in Monterey… Awesome.