Halcyon City

The sounds we hear in our daily lives can seem mundane, annoying, or even irritating.

But what if we listened with a new mindful perspective? Splice Explores: Halcyon City captures the everyday sounds of Los Angeles and puts them through a series of effects, processing, and experimentation. The result is an urban soundscape transformed into a lush suite of ambient and meditative sound-healing samples. Composer and producer Liam Fox O’Brien took to the city streets and captured field recordings with his Zoom H6 that, in essence, tend to be quite harsh and abrasive, peppered with noise (some notable players were police sirens, howling coyotes, heavy machinery and air traffic). Back in the studio, he began a long process of reshaping these sounds. Using tape-looping, time-stretching, filtering, and a vast toolkit of experimental sound design techniques, he twisted, warped, and whittled away at the source material to create samples to inspire calmness and tranquility. He recorded those samples to magnetic 1/4 inch tape and then, by slowing the tape down and making loops that re-record over themselves, the twisted and mangles files found a new warmth and character. Liam then replicated a kind of additive-granular-synthesis effect that gave the environmental sounds texture and depth. Finally he recorded everything back into his computer and found hidden magic through exploration and experimentation by pulling some frequencies away, compressing some and boosting others, to ultimately sculpt unique tones that were complex and rich due to the additional noises that were captured at the source.Hopefully this pack can inspire a new appreciation for your local natural sonic identity and be the secret ingredient to embracing a new perspective, a new sense of calm, and a new layer of character in your next track. Download these samples now and rethink what’s possible around you.