Across the Road

Composer, Greg Hooper, has been busy with a set of fantastic phonography works. His latest is titled “Across the Road.” For this piece Greg meticulously recorded the construction work on a house across the street from his own once a week at the same time for 28 weeks. “Across the Road” is mesmerizing and wonderfully unique.   Its available at Bandcamp on the label Analogous-Sounds.

Here is the official description of the work:

A field recording of a house being built across the road. I recorded an hour every Tuesday morning (at about 10:00 am) for 28 weeks. Each week provides – I think – 20 secs of both background and individual spot sound. The background was developed by taking a representative sample from that week, taking the FFT randomising the phase, then taking the IFFT, to give a noise sample that represented the spectrum (but not the dynamical structure) of that week. This was then convolved with representative sound of whatever the activity of that week was. Overlaid on top of that are spot sounds that seemed to me to represent the normal sounds of that week. The density of the sounds is determined by a drawing the builder made of the activity cycle across the entire building period.