[01] Mario Verandi: Noise Networks

This radio piece explores a sound territory that is beyond the "normal" functions and uses of hardware and software. The digital domain offers a unique new spectrum of digital distortions and noises to be explored. Over the past two years I have collected a wide range of noises produced mainly by the unintentional misuse of computers, printers, scanners, CD-burners, sound cards, video cards and hard-disks. These noises belong to the universe of digital detritus, by-products and artefacts and are born through error and failure.

The sound materials used are glitches, crackles, bugs, application errors, system crashes, clipping, aliasing, distortion, quantization noise, misuse of software algorithms, soundfile corruption, and DSP errors. All these "noises" are used in their original state. Basic editing, equalisation, reverberation and pitch change was applied to give shape and color to these sounds as well as to extend the palette of timbres.

Noise Networks is inspired by Luigi Russolo´s book The Art of Noises (1913):
"The variety of noises is infinite. If today, when we have perhaps a thousand different machines, we can distinguish a thousand different noises, tomorrow, as new machines multiply, we will be able to distinguish ten, twenty, or thirty thousand different noises, not merely in a simply imitative way, but to combine them according to our imagination."
- Luigi Russolo (1913)