Hubbub is an urban soundscape composition that seeks to uncover the marvellous within the everyday. The piece is constructed from a series of field recordings made in Paris during two separate visits in 2002. Conceived as an audio journal or travelogue without narration, it invites the listener to experience the city through sound alone.
In the rush of metropolitan life, we are often preoccupied with moving swiftly from one destination to another, rarely pausing to attend to the sonic textures that surround us. Even as the recordist, many of the most compelling and unusual sounds only revealed themselves later, through careful listening to the captured material. What might seem incidental in the moment becomes vivid and resonant in retrospect.
The many busking musicians encountered while wandering the city provided an incidental yet vital soundtrack. Their presence lends the work a distinct cinematic quality. In shaping the composition, I chose to heighten this filmic character through deliberate editing and by structuring the piece into loosely defined ‘scenes’, echoing the rhythm and flow of a visual narrative.
One recurring moment in the piece arose when two passersby, curious about my activity, stopped to ask what I was doing. On learning that I was recording sounds, they conferred briefly and decided to contribute a phrase to the microphone: “I got no voice.” The sentence is at once disarmingly simple, oddly poignant, and unexpectedly profound. It prompted me to reflect on my own practice and to ask: where, in the works I compose, is the voice of the people I record? Do they truly have a voice within these constructions? Should I be doing more to enable that? The final question may be rhetorical, yet their seemingly off the cuff remark has remained with me ever since.
These recordings document my first experiences of Paris—a city to which I have returned many times since. They also form my first substantial field recording based work. Listening back now, I am reminded not only of specific places and moments, but of the emotions they carried: the exhilaration, the disorientation, and the sense of wonder at the vibrant chaos of it all.
Hubbub was first broadcast on Resonance FM in 2004 and was selected for ‘Drift’ a festival of sound and radio art in Glasgow in 2003. It was also released as a limited edition CDR on meagre resource records (mere 011).