For the Goethe Institut Virtuelles Musikproject in collaboration with TinTin Patrone, I composed 2 6mins soundscape pieces.
“ECQ BDA” (Yraola, 2021)
After living in Hong Kong for 5 years, I move back home to Manila in 2020. I have just received the last of my moving boxes from Hong Kong just a week shy of the first lockdown due to the Covid pandemic in March.
I was locked in my family home—a 40-year-old house surrounded by a lush garden, walled and gated but just a few metres away from the expressway. The auditory experience on the first day of the lockdown was surreal, as the constant presence of machine sounds, suddenly stopped—abruptly, not gradually. This quiet persisted for many months, until we are more used to hearing the birds, and even a small lizard. As the lockdown eases up, so do the machine sounds return. But somehow it did not sound like the way they did before.
This work is a composite of audio recording inside the residential property between March 2020 to November 2020, and this is how my homecoming. ECQ BDA stands for Enhanced Community Quarantine: Before, During and After.
“ECQ BDA” (Yraola, 2021)
After living in Hong Kong for 5 years, I move back home to Manila in 2020. I have just received the last of my moving boxes from Hong Kong just a week shy of the first lockdown due to the Covid pandemic in March.
I was locked in my family home—a 40-year-old house surrounded by a lush garden, walled and gated but just a few metres away from the expressway. The auditory experience on the first day of the lockdown was surreal, as the constant presence of machine sounds, suddenly stopped—abruptly, not gradually. This quiet persisted for many months, until we are more used to hearing the birds, and even a small lizard. As the lockdown eases up, so do the machine sounds return. But somehow it did not sound like the way they did before.
This work is a composite of audio recording inside the residential property between March 2020 to November 2020, and this is how my homecoming. ECQ BDA stands for Enhanced Community Quarantine: Before, During and After.
(1) This video was taken via CCTV on the evening before the implementation of the lockdown in March; there were street repairs that were happening on the expressway few metres away from our compound.
(2) This video was taken from the front lawn of our house, as I was recording during the lockdown.
(3) This video was taken the day after the first lockdown was lifted. There were 3 hospitals near my area, the silence is usually punctuated with ambulance sirens, as if reminding us that the pandemic is not yet over.
"Twitter" (Yraola, 2021)
Twitter, the social media app, is something we listen to. We have made it a “voice” relevant to our lives. Every tweet, a reaction. This is what I am exploring in composing the sound work “Twitter”. It is a composite of actual bird sounds collected from my family home during the pandemic lockdown and electronic bird sounds that I made in my computer. In bringing these twitters to our bike ride, I am interested to find out whether people would have the same compulsion to pay attention every time there is a tweet, as they do in the social media app; and ultimately how this attempt to call-attention via audition from and for moving bodies will translate into connectedness (no matter how temporary).
The compositions I made for this virtual residency are works that attempts to bring the sound of Manila (or a portion of it) to Germany—to my collaborative partner, TinTin, which she can use as reference in composing her work that brings together her own auditory experience when she visited Manila in 2019, how it had been lately vis-à-vis her present place of residence.
Twitter, the social media app, is something we listen to. We have made it a “voice” relevant to our lives. Every tweet, a reaction. This is what I am exploring in composing the sound work “Twitter”. It is a composite of actual bird sounds collected from my family home during the pandemic lockdown and electronic bird sounds that I made in my computer. In bringing these twitters to our bike ride, I am interested to find out whether people would have the same compulsion to pay attention every time there is a tweet, as they do in the social media app; and ultimately how this attempt to call-attention via audition from and for moving bodies will translate into connectedness (no matter how temporary).
The compositions I made for this virtual residency are works that attempts to bring the sound of Manila (or a portion of it) to Germany—to my collaborative partner, TinTin, which she can use as reference in composing her work that brings together her own auditory experience when she visited Manila in 2019, how it had been lately vis-à-vis her present place of residence.
(4) This video of “Twitter” in preparation for its usage for the performance “Music for 1000 Bicycles”
Dayang Yraola
Manila, Philippines
December 2021
Manila, Philippines
December 2021
In response, I made a 2mins composition, titled “100 Bikes”.
My contribution to “1000 Bicycles” is mainly based on sounds and samples of the Filipino mainstream techno genre called ‘Budots’. After close discussions with Dayang Yraola, the framework for sound and subsequent performance was determined. Audio and visual elements should be related to the Filipino background of the original concept as much as possible. For my part, the focus fell on current urban music trends in the Philippines. These are intended to represent a special contrast to the field recording-based audio material by Dayang Yraola and thus reflect a state of lived reality and the imposed renunciation of certain types of music consumption.
Another influence on the compositional decisions mentioned were sound related memories of my last visits to the Philippines., above all, the loudspeakers in public transportation vehicles that are present everywhere and turned up in volume, bawling out material from every music genre between pop, rock and techno to keep guests and ferries entertained and awake.
The attached sound file only represents a selection of the Budots samples and field recordings from Manila. The final composition cannot be created as a recording in advance, as the performance also includes random components. In the summer of 2022, 100 bicycles are to move around in a parking garage on different levels, each of them will start in different teams and different loops with different sound categories (drums, effects, voice samples, etc.). This creates a loop that is constantly changing and enabling different perceptual experiences depending on the position of listeners.
TinTin Patrone
Hamburg, Germany
December 2021
Hamburg, Germany
December 2021
This residency is supported by 