How to make music when you are left with no instruments in an isolated place far, far away? In this instance, I spent a week in a hotel in Bangkok to attend Linaro Connect BKK16 which is basically a software conference about Linux on ARM processors (Android on your smartphone is one of them). That's 7 hours away from the UK, so it's not always easy to sleep at night. And in any case, I don't like to spend a week without making any music at all. I didn't bring any instrument with me but I had my digital sound recorder and my own ARM Chromebook laptop running Linux with a few useful bits of free software such as Splat and Audacity.
It was room number 3124, on the 31st floor, in the middle of Bangkok. The view was quite good from the top 55th floor, and I guess I could have recorded the ambiance noise of the city. I also spent some time visiting the ancient city which did have its own interesting set of sounds. Instead, I just recorded a few minutes of noise made by various things in my hotel room every evening and starting pulling everything together into a piece on the laptop around the end of the week. I almost finished it on the plane on the way back on Saturday and wrapped it all up today.
Everything you hear comes from plain sound recordings that have been cut, sometimes stretched and eventually sequenced together. Nothing was artificially synthesized. I did have quite a bit of fun isolating 32 different drops of water from a raw recording and sequencing them in a regular rhythm but in a random order around the end of piece! You can download all the sound samples along with the Splat source code if you want to reuse some of that or recreate the piece and modify it. I didn't include all the original sounds but maybe I'll add them to a sound library section on this website at some point in the future...
