This is a small drum loop I made in the first session of the Creative Sound Projects Unit. In this exercise, we were given 10 minutes to record sounds with our phones around the school and then had to use the remaining time experimenting, processing, and arranging them into a loop. I used many different sounds, including myself gurgling water, a didgeridoo, smacking bits of metal against each other, and slamming a glass door closed. I then processed the samples that caught my ear, tuning them into different instruments for the track. After bouncing this loop, transposing it down 12 semitones, and adding some extra distortion effects over this, it felt like a cohesive and violent club beat. This exercise encouraged me to contextualize natural foley sounds and imagine their potential application, sculpting them to be visceral and effective. I feel like this was approached in a manner slightly akin to musique concrète, except that the manipulation process and results were vastly different in aesthetic, and my application of the sounds was maybe more structural and direct. However, things like the sound of my breathing acting as risers or the natural lilt at the end of my blowing in a didgeridoo in the bass felt tinged by the discussions I had about the topic in class. I am interested in the results if I take this heavy processing approach but with an abstract compositional fluidity more directly inspired by the philosophy of musique concrète. This is maybe something to consider when creating my final sound peice. I imagine developing this practice could change how I listen to sounds in my natural environments. I already feel that my creative speculation when it comes to a sound’s natural characteristics has been broadened. This was a fun session, and I will try to introduce more self-recorded sounds into my project outside of school.