The five pieces of this cycle all had working titles (“wt”) that represented the sounds recorded, either in nature or in the studio. The underscore is, for me, a means of joining words (snake_case), indicating hierarchy and giving stress to the word itself. I will rarely write a filename with spaces so I’m very used to underscores, hyphens and camelCase. A single leading underscore also resonates with computer coding which interests me enormously (though I am still learning), especially when it delivers interesting sounds! Hence the titles of five of these pieces are “wt_primarySoundSource.”

wt_ceramics, wt_birds and wt_metals began with very productive recording sessions. Thanks to Mario Cáceres for his assistance in recording a large ceramic plant pot, a bird whistler, and metal sheets.

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Sounds were drawn from a ceramic pot which was played extensively during recording in the studio. It was also played outside with added environmental context. Techniques of granulation and filtering were used to explore the sounds further. It is gentle in form with some dark undertones.

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wt_ceramics was realized in 2024 at the composer’s studio in Sheffield (England, UK).

Composition

• 2024, Personal studio, Sheffield (England, UK)

Premiere

• September 28, 2024, Concert 2, St Andrew’s Church, Leicester (England, UK)

An imaginary forest with environmental sounds and a bird whistle. It is a very common trope to contrast the real with something fake or synthesized so that an unreal situation can be constructed through sound manipulation.

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wt_birds was realized in 2024 at the composer’s studio in Sheffield (England, UK).

Composition

• 2024, Personal studio, Sheffield (England, UK)

Premiere

• March 27, 2025, Composing (with) Systems: Concert 2, Drama Studio — The University of Sheffield, Sheffield (England, UK)

A “Health_and_Safety_breaking” glass-rub session led to sounds as difficult to work with as the whiteboard pens I recorded back in 1995-96 for Study in Ink (1997). The pitches were quite “thin”; the noisier sounds just didn’t transform to the degree that I wanted. However the noisier sounds (pressing hard on the rim of the glass) were quite surprising given the size of the wine glass used.

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wt_glass was realized in 2024 at the composer’s studio in Sheffield (England, UK).

Composition

• 2024, Personal studio, Sheffield (England, UK)

Two metal sheets were played (rubbed, scraped and flexed) and then manipulated. Perhaps the most obvious points where manipulation is audible is towards the last third of the piece where something “regular” appears. It almost sounds as though someone is playing the sheet with sticks like a cymbal. Scraping the metal sheet gave rise to some nice resonances, often inharmonic. It was often best leaving these untreated save for editing, equalization and mixing.

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wt_metals was realized in 2024 at the composer’s studio in Sheffield (England, UK).

Composition

• 2024, Personal studio, Sheffield (England, UK)

Premiere

• September 28, 2024, Concert 2, St Andrew’s Church, Leicester (England, UK)

A companion to Voices in the Dark (2023), perhaps more textural in style.

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wt_voices2 was realized in 2024 at the composer’s studio in Sheffield (England, UK).

Composition

• 2024, Personal studio, Sheffield (England, UK)

Voices in the Dark brings together sounds that are looking for a voice, trying to become. Sometimes we mix sounds as though we are giving agency to something and it is trying to speak to us. Voices in the dark — darkness in the voice.

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Voices in the Dark was realized in 2023 at the composer’s studio in Sheffield (England, UK) and premiered on October 9, 2023, as part of the Festival Contemporáneo 2023 at Teatro Leal in La Laguna (Spain) and repeated on October 12, 2023, during the same festival at Teatro Guinigua in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Spain). Thanks to Carlos González Bolaños for the invitation to present these two concerts.

Composition

• 2023, Personal studio, Sheffield (England, UK)

Premiere

• October 9, 2023, Festival Contemporáneo 2023: Dúo Nimikry y Adrian Moore, Teatro Leal, La Laguna (Spain)

Awards

• Finalist, Category A (fixed medium), Musica Nova 2023, Prague (Czech Republic)

Audiogentry is a short soundscape work using field recordings made by staff and students in and around Kelham Island Museum. Prominent among the sounds recorded is the huge River Don Engine with squeals and bangs. Just off the island, on the other side of the Don, but still sitting easily against the loft apartments, restaurants, cafes and gastro-pubs was Woodware Repetitions Ltd (wood turners), part of the famous George Barnsley dynasty. It was important that I captured “working” sounds of then and now. On the wood turners’ factory floor you hear a repetitive saw as blocks were continuously cut by hand.

All of these sounds are — to most people — loud (everyone on the Woodware factory floor had ear protectors), noisy (full of frequencies), harsh and ugly. Part of my process therefore was to bring these sounds under control by setting them in a new audio environment and exaggerating aspects of their pitch and rhythm. Squeals are extracted and turned to musical pitches and loud, industrial noises are given a mechanical pulse (perhaps made to breathe). Harsh sounds are coloured to extract drones and harmonies. The noise of the dirty is rendered clean and popular through the addition of a layer of pitch and the structure of pulse. Gentrification of noisy audio? You decide…

One of the techniques used at the beginning of this piece (and adopted again in the wt_ pieces) is side-chain compression. This is where one sound’s amplitude “controls” the dynamics of another. You often hear this technique in dance music where the kick drum dampens the synth momentarily and then the synth comes back in. Technically it allows both sounds to have more amplitude and remain louder in a mix. For me it also gives sounds a sense of related pulse or energy transfer.

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Audiogentry was realized in 2019 at the composer’s studio in Sheffield (England, UK) and premiered on July 17, 2019, during the event From Brooklyn Works to Brooklynism: An Evening of Sonic Art and Poetry at the Kelham Island Museum in Sheffield (England, UK).

Composition

• 2019, Personal studio, Sheffield (England, UK)

Premiere

• July 17, 2019, From Brooklyn Works to Brooklynism: An Evening of Sonic Art and Poetry, Kelham Island Museum, Sheffield (England, UK)

Subtitled “An acousmatic experience beyond the soundscape” this is a piece that is tied to a specific place, a specific space and a specific time. It is about the sounds of change. I came to the Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield (England, UK) in early 2019 as construction was beginning on a new, outdoor garden designed by internationally acclaimed landscape architect Tom Stuart-Smith. I recorded the levelling of the ground (machines), the river that runs next to the gallery and its interior spaces. This was not a documentary but more of a sonic postcard as I then gave myself quite a lot of artistic freedom to manipulate and edit my recordings. The recordings themselves were really nice to work with. The outdoor spaces had a sense of being open and early in the year. The interior spaces had their own magical acoustic; big, but quiet. Once finished, the garden would have a series of entrances and exits (and triggered the idea for my work Routes (2019-20) which has a number of paths through the piece that a performer can choose). I recorded the huge percussion drills hammering the concrete foundations of what stood before on site. When they stopped the reverberant space opened up like a breath of fresh air. It was almost like the outside space was breathing. (I find the breathing metaphor to be really useful when composing. If I have points where I deliberately breathe or relax, I hope these points will appear to others). Like the saws in Audiogentry (2019), whilst the percussion drills were not necessarily nice sounds they challenged me to extract something musical like a pulse, an acceleration or a pitch. I also used processes such as convolution and spectral cross-synthesis to colour noise-based sounds with a pitch which tempered the noisiness for a moment.

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Recording the Hepworth was realized in 2019 at the composer’s studio in Sheffield (England, UK) and premiered on April 26, 2019, as part of the Modern Nature: Symposium at The Hepworth Wakefield in Wakefield (England, UK).

Composition

• 2019, Personal studio, Sheffield (England, UK)

Premiere

• April 26, 2019, Modern Nature: Symposium: Adrian Moore — An acousmatic experience beyond the soundscape, The Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield (England, UK)