Elevated (Grand Chicago)
An onomatopoetic memory of Chicago.
2009 ShortDocs Challenge: Chicago Sound Drops2009 / Aaron Ximm / TCF, USA
An onomatopoetic memory of Chicago.
Commissioned by Third Coast for the Chicago Sound Drops collection - short audio works that conjure the city through sound, story, and imagination.
Hear all 13 Chicago Sound Drops.
From Aaron Ximm: Elevated (Grand Chicago) was made by recording five people reading an alphabetical list of about 400 words (down from 600+ candidates). I diced those up in my DAW to have 2000 clips, each labeled with the word spoken and colorized to indicate speaker. The whole thing was then constructed via intuition and experiment and serendipity; none of it was premeditated. Some parts ended up (to my ear) sounding very "performed" but that was most always the result of judicious editing of the various intonations and deliveries of each person.
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Aaron Ximm is a San Francisco-based field recordist and sound artist.
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