City Ditties

I created these short musical compositions on a smartphone, on location, in 3 hours or less, using only environmental sounds I recorded while moving through the place.

City Ditties provides a partial map of my neighbourhood and surrounding areas, explored through sound. These are places I pass through, places I visit, and places that have made an impression on me. Using a smartphone, I composed a short piece of music for each of these places, in each of these places, using only sounds from each of these places. Each composition arose from a single session, where variables like the weather, time of day, and my mood played significant roles in the pieces. With City Ditties I am concerned precisely with the influence of a time and place on the creative process, and with the idea of a truly mobile sound studio.

City Ditties was my contribution to Taien Ng-Chan’s collaborative project Detours: Poetics of the City.