The staff at the teahouse got interested, all they could hear was us singing and hitting teaspoons and laughing. I sang along to the notes in the cafe to accentuate them. It was so much fun! The sounds of tea being made, the door opening, teaspoons hitting cups, amplified and enhanced by repetition! Those sounds were unexpected, made musical and wonderfully tingly. So, extra headphones bought, splitter in, time to try my rudimentary iPad device on CJ and Sean in a quiet teahouse. My ideal system would allow for me to sing and play melody and harmony but I was nowhere near doing that yet. Raw audio is changed in real-time and enhanced with sound effects, and crucially, I added basic musical elements and phrases that would play simultaneously. A while later, I got the thing working in a way I liked and emerged from my room, eager to try it on other musical / technical people. So, grabbing my iPad and headphone splitters, I built the first iteration of a device that messed with the ambient sound in the room in real time in a pleasurable manner. They were instrumental in my sleep-deprived electronic inspiration. Sean Manton and CJ Carr (who was familiar with glitching) were two other music hackers I met at the Hackathon. But glitching with modern tech sounded like a great way to reveal the music I hear all the time – plus I wanted to add a more musical classical compositional element to the practice.
The idea of adjusting auditory experience or adding a ‘Glitch’ to reality – at least in aural terms – is not a new process. The day before I left, instead of packing neatly as normal I optimistically chucked everything I could see into my case and hoped for the best. I was sharing a small apartment with a bunch of other music obsessives. It was the day after winning a prize at MusicTechFest’s Boston Hackathon event, which I took part in and filmed for the BBC. I really wanted to share my experience as I find it very beautiful. Speech is intrinsically musical for me, and so is the rest of the world – from cars passing to people typing. There’s a great Radiolab episode which explains the phenomenon.įor me, I don’t require repetition in order to hear spoken phrases as musical. Essentially, a spoken phrase repeated often enough starts to take on musical qualities. Some of the background to what I think is going on: Around twenty years ago, psychology professor Diana Deutsch discovered what she called the Speech to Song illusion. To date, around fifty people have tried my mobile composing inspiration rig with me – mostly with very enthusiastic responses afterwards, and in the more musical/auditory types there’s also a degree of joyful disorientation. I recently gave a talk at TedXTokyo 2014about a musical device I built with the aim of giving other people the chance to hear the world as musically as I do.
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