Both the “Polybuffer” and “Urban/Detrimental” soundscapes are electronic tracks mostly using sampled sounds from Downtown San Jose. These were created as part of a project in San Jose State’s Electro-acoustic Music class. Four Soundscapes were created based on a theme, of which there were four: Nature sounds, non-detrimental urban sounds, urban/detrimental sounds, and post-human. These soundscapes were meant to be played outside in the Paseo de San Antonio for people to walk through. 

I was assigned the urban/detrimental category (detrimental being how impactful it is to the environment), so I made the tracks using recordings from downtown and later processed them in softwares like SPEAR, Max, Pro Tools, and Logic. The first track, “Polybuffer,” is more story-oriented in that I wanted to show a progression of nature sounds being overwhelmed by industrial sounds, so I used samples of birds and sounds of the freeway, light rail sounds, and buses driving by. The second track “Urban/Detrimental” was made entirely of samples of buses, cars, planes, etc. which were then granularized and placed into a polybuffer, which is what creates the rhythmic effect across the speakers.