Coining a Term

When a person types a blog, the clicks of the keyboard seem to echo into a digital abyss. The feeling of releasing paragraphs of personal pontification is like sending Moses down the river in a basket, on a much smaller scale of course. Is anybody going to stumble upon that which was written, and if so, will the time be taken to read it? Digest it? Respond to it?

Now that I have entered the ranks of those putting digital thoughts onto remote servers, I am painfully aware of the silence that follows the push of the 'publish' button. So to the score or so of you readers who have taken the time to drop a line in response to what you have read or heard here, you have my sincere appreciation.

To that end, most of the responses trickling into my box have expressed interest in the two scratch recordings that appear in previous posts. That is a good thing, because ultimately, this project is about music, not about words on a screen.

The comments have been mostly encouraging, though an alarming percentage of them have come from my mother, who suffers from an illness of the mind called blind love. To illustrate this point, let's suppose I got a sharp knife and cut up some hunks of crusty bread. Undoubtedly she would say something like, "Oh honey, those slices are beautiful, just perfect really. And I'm not saying that because you are my son. You wield that knife with such precision, such fervor, such finesse. Sure, we've all heard of sliced bread before, but I had no idea of the glories that could become of it when you grace the procedure with your touch."

Thanks mom for the affirmations, inflated as they may be. Lots of love to you, perhaps my most avid reader.

But there have been others, some of whom I have never met before, and everyone seems to be enjoying the sounds that emanate from objects typically thought unmusical. With decades worth of history as a percussionist, it is only natural for me to bang on boxes, scratch on screens, tap on tulips (okay, clearly an overuse of alliteration). And it is amazing to find, and now start to collect, an obtuse array of sonic possibilities created from a random scattering of stuff.

I have always been fascinated by the the yet to be known. What would a fifth food group contain? What colors might appear past ultraviolet or infrared? It makes sense that my two scratch recordings both draw sounds from everyday objects.

I'm officially coining a term today, and here it is: Found Sound.

The be-all and end-all of knowledge, Wikipedia, only has one brief reference to the term in an article entitled 'Found Art.' So without any regard for actual research about it, I don thee Found Sound to be an official term of music referring to the art of assembling sounds from everyday objects into coherent musical compositions.

Collecting gear for the Redline Project fits well into the Found Sound concept. So far, I am using a microphone from a buddy's closet and a mixer from an ad on CraigsList, and I just received word that I can access an electric guitar currently doing time as wall art in a friend's living room. To some degree, this concept will hopefully become one of the hallmarks of this developing project idea.