Music for 6 Boom Boxes

Music for 6 Boom Boxes by David Flood is part of the XSL, a free sound collection curated by Thalamus Lab.

Music for 6 Boom Boxes (Mf6BB) was a piece designed as a sound installation for the Real Art Ways gallery in Hartford in 2009 as part of their local artist series. It was inspired by the sonic experience of walking into the Mohegan Sun casino. Inside the casino hundreds of electronic game machines were playing all at once and created the most incredible sonic cloud floating just below the ceiling. That sonic curtain playing endlessly was a revelation to me. Surely this beautiful accidental music could be crafted into something intentional.

The original music was designed in a multi-stage process using multiple music and sound editing software. A simple, repeating 6 minute melody was created in Garageband. It was exported to Sapling where it was harmonically multiplied by 4. Here it also received it's dynamic behaviors of variable looping and backwards reverberation. The four new versions are individually exported to MetaMix where they were further randomized. Here additional elements from the original were added. Finally the six versions were brought into Soundbooth for editing and mixing into separate tracks. They were then burned to six CDs with additional tracks of pure silence. All the tracks on all the discs (both silent and sonic) were of varying lengths.

In the installation, six strategically placed portable CD players were positioned above and around the existing artworks in the main gallery. The six CDs were placed into the players. The CD players were then put into the all-important "Random / Repeat" mode and allowed to play indefinitely at a volume just below the room's natural ambience.

The end result was an unpredictable layering of the various elements and silences producing endless variations of the original piece.

I like this process. It's long and complicated and requires a lot of careful listening in the beginning that becomes unpredictable discovery at the end. It's ambient music that's constantly both static and dynamic. The idea is to create a sonic wall of sound that acts on the listener's subconscious.

My hope for Mf6BB and the other works I create would be they quietly enhance the space they inhabit with an ever-changing soundtrack that is felt rather than directly heard.