VVR was composed during my residency at the 2013 Festival de Internacional de Inverno UFSM in Vale Vêneto, Brasil.  All of the sounds in the piece were collected, processed and recomposed during the week-long festival. I am personally fond of two specific sounds. The first is the siren, which came from the town police car. Near the end of our sound walk that day, one of the students went up to the policeman and asked if he would play the siren so that we could record it.  The policeman was reluctant at first, and I didn’t want to cause any kind of commotion. But he went ahead and played the siren, much to the delight of the kids in the town square.

The other sound is the background “pop” music heard near the end of the piece. The winter festival coincides with the Italian Heritage festival in Vale Vêneto, and the town plays a variety of Italian pop/folk songs across loudspeakers throughout the town square.  You can hear it almost everywhere outside, and it is a persistent part of the audio landscape.  I felt it was impossible to create a soundscape of the town without it.