Aurphones

2012

3’42”

with

Ross Whyte - video art

This repeating series of ten short “orphans”, which gradually slows down through the 3.5 minutes of the film, made me think of my early days as a composer of electroacoustic music, when I used magnetic tape to create music rather than hard disk space. I used to throw endless amounts of this stuff in the bin at the end of a session, bits of tape containing sounds that I’d decided that I didn’t want to use. Composing in the digital domain, there’s nothing “thrown away” like this as you don’t actually cut into the equivalent of a piece of tape and discard what you don’t need; the computer finds the portion of the sound you want to work with and leaves the original file unaltered.

For the soundtrack to this film, I decided to revisit a number of recent pieces of music and find parts of sounds that I did not use in the final piece; digital audio orphans – or “aurphones”.