Them Upstairs

trawnajim

Ok, this now relatively short piece started out much longer; almost two hours. The sounds were obtained by placing two contact mics at different points around the rim of a circular light fixture in my apartment ceiling to get sounds created by folks in the unit above (hence the title). Of course, whenever I attempt something like this most activity comes to a standstill and so there are few sounds. In this instance there were just a few sparse events interspersed with lots of bugger-all. There was a constant hum throughout though which I didn’t like so captured a sample and used it for noise reduction. Once that had been done I removed all the silence (not manually, there’s an app for that) and was left with about a minute and a half of sound. This was then manipulated with tempo change, pitch shifting, and one or two other tweaks to give the result here.