A DAY (3.13s)
by Michael Manning
London, 2011


Alarms used
Wireless car lock, school fire alarm, watch beeps, 80's digital alarm clock, oven timer, car horn and an ECG scanner.


The track in a sentence...
24 hours in 3 minutes.


How he did it
Michael drew inspiration from the composer R Murray Schafer. Schafer writes about signals and the evolving soundscape in his book, 'The Tuning of the world.' He talks of how noises and signals (like alarms) we hear every day are always changing. And that technology will mean that the sound of London will be very different in 50 years from now.

Michael thought about the sheer number of alarms that people are subjected to on a daily basis. And this led him to create a track inspired by how alarms can continue to ring in your head even after they've stopped.

The track became an abstraction of how time can be perceived at the end of a day. A subconscious memory of a day's activity, simplified down to just the alarms.

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Michael composes music and is a sound designer for video games, film and the web.