Hey guise!! Here’s my fifth micro project for Experimental Interaction, taking glitch art and destruction one step further with Joseph, Joel and Siqi as me groupmates!! :-))))

We decided to do an audio piece where we sang ‘Happy Birthday’ in an echo-ey area (the staircase near the 2D Studio) that gave us lots of reverb to add an interesting texture to the initial recording. After that we recorded other random sounds from the environment that could add shock factor into the final audio.

Here’s a list of audio:

Using Audacity, we then manipulated the audio by using the ‘Birthday’ song as the base track, then layering the additional sounds on top of it while repeating the sounds, changing the pitch and speed, adding extra reverb, and basically almost every effect function there is in Audacity lmao.

Here’s the final audio from us:

What I found interesting was that we picked the song ‘Happy Birthday’, a song that everyone is definitely familiar with, as well as sounds from the ADM environment, such as the door opening and closing, and a waterbottle dropping on the floor — sounds and songs that are ubiquitous.

However, the glitching of the sounds has produced something that is unpleasant, ghastly and unfamiliar, despite containing the same data and sounds from before, but simply cut up, rearranged, and adjusted to the point where it cannot be recognised any longer. Empirically, both of our original sets of sound and the final outcome are no different, but at the same time, the glitching procedure has made sure that they are vastly different.