CONCRETA is basically a library of sound objects that comes from my passion for electroacoustic music, indeed it’s quite common in this context to manufacture acoustic laptops amplified with piezoelectric microphones at home, in order to expand, through processes of sound manipulation in real time, the purely acoustic characteristics of the instrument.

CONCRETA is also a sound library that, at least conceptually, is inspired by the founding principles of musique concrète: a music made up of “sound objects”, which starts from the experience of acousmatic listening and comes to define a new way of listening , investigate and use the sound matter. Through a process of analysis that we call reduced listening, the sound object is in fact stripped of all those causal and semantic references, considered irrelevant in this context, and reduced to the more purely morphological and structural aspects of its nature. The result is the discovery of a new sound objectivity, no longer based on the sources but on the perception that one has of the sound itself.

Similarly this library arises from the sampling of musical instruments assembled using commonly used objects (nails, screws, brushes, sponges, springs, metal objects of various types and many others), which have been chosen solely on the basis of their sound characteristics, independently what their original functions were. We can say that in a certain sense we are dealing with “found objects” which have been given a second life, exactly like the “found sounds” which in concrete music are elevated to the role of sound actors in a musical composition.

From a more practical point of view, in this library there are three instruments whose sounds obviously come from different acoustic laptops. The first instrument “Acoustic Elements” contains very natural acoustic sounds, which can be used percussively to create rhythms and loops. The second instrument “Acoustic impacts” is a collection of acoustic sounds processed with a stronger impact, such as Hits and Booms. The third instrument “Bowed Metals” instead contains the sound effects obtained by playing with the bow the metal parts of the laptops in a very aggressive way.

When I put these three instruments together I tried above all to enhance their rhythmic aspect, in fact I suggest you try to use the sequencer to create rhythmic patterns and try combinations using all three instruments, you can find some examples in the Multi Instruments folder. Have fun!

Note: the acoustic laptop in the picture is actually the laptop that was used in most of the recordings. I deeply thank Gianluca Cabras https://www.instagram.com/swordronemusic/ who, in addition to having built this laptop himself, was also so kind to lend it to me for this project.