|
Renowned Austrian electronic music composer Lukas Ligeti has compiled a collage of street sounds in and around Johannesburg.
 |
 Fear of Silence WMA, 2:30 Min. |
FEAR OF SILENCE, a short electronic piece featuring alarm sounds recorded in Johannesburg, was composed for the Goethe Institute Johannesburg, for the present conference and website.
In crime-ridden Jo'burg, alarms - car alarms, residential alarms, and many other types...thankfully not fire or bomb alarms - are part of the daily soundscape. Piecing such sounds together to shape a composition is therefore, in some respects, the consummate crime. Some of the alarms used are quite stereotypical, while others allow the user improvisational freedom while sounding them, making their sounds akin to a little pieces of music in their own right. These different-sounding alarms are combined here in various ways, sometimes accompanying one another, sometimes completing each other to form polymetric hocketing structures. And at the end, when the sound of an alarm siren plays a melancholy, township-jive-influenced melody, it becomes clear yet again what an integral part of the South African soundscape the alarm siren has become.
