A sonic description of a chaotic day in my hometown of São Paulo. The piece intends to represent the city with symbolic sounds that produce the feeling of being in it. Car and helicopter sounds, voices and the brightness of city lights at night, recreate the intensity of living in this megapolis. The voices reproduce the phoneme that only exists in portuguese: the ɐ̃. The helicopters fly around the listener’s ears, and the synthesizers provide the ground upon which the listener walks. The intension wasn’t to produce a soundscape of the city, but to represent it symbolically with sounds. The synthesized sounds were a mixture of additive and granular synthesis using samples of the ɐ̃ phoneme. The concrete sounds consisted in computer engines, space heaters, a glass taperware cover, and a flipping coin.

Source: 2013