Audacity and the Music Collage

Music Concrete was invented by Pierre Schaeffer in which discrete elements of sound were recorded and then fused together in layers and sequences to create a collage, usually of ambient sounds. This process was once physically produced through the manipulation of recorded tape, spliced, processed, and reassembled. A deconstruction and reconstruction often achieving marvelous and impressive structures.

You may have worked with this process in other formats such as "Found Poetry." In found poetry you use a published article in a magazine or newspaper and cut up the words into discrete pieces of paper which you then reassemble into your found poetry. A variant of this was to go through ads in magazines cutting out descriptive phrases and then assembling them into constructs as poetry.

One of the followers of Schaeffer is François Bayle. Bayle has continued to expand upon the concept of musique concrete with multiple speakers that provide extensive opportunities to manipulate sound in space. In these sound collages, the spatial dimension of sound becomes a component equal to pitch, timbre, and rhythm--- not only location of sound in space, but the movement of sound through space.

A multitrack recording program such as Audacity provides a means to capturing the process of deconstructing a sound source and reconstructing it into separate tracks. There are many ways to approach this creative activity, but I am suggesting locating and establishing a source track that becomes the first track of your work. Create 4-6 additional tracks, and then cut and paste selections from your source track into the different tracks, being guided by your imagination of how you would like the sound to be experienced.

In addition to selecting short clips of sound from your source, try experimenting with the effects by reversing the sound, adding echo, changing the pitch, changing the spead, etc. As you experiment, remember that you can always try something and then select "undo" if your trial is unacceptable (i.e., does not fit into your concept about the sound collage).

Once you have completed filling and editing the tracks for your music concrete, delete the source track before exporting your mix to an mp3 file. Be sure to save the project with the source track, and save again as a project without the source track. Saving these aup projects permits you to revisit your piece and make revisions.