James Kennedy - Water Babies

'Water Babies' is an experimental electronic piece of music composed & produced by James Kennedy and is the 1st track on his 2012 solo album '9.i.P.'

The ambient work can broadly be described as 'Musique Concrete' due to it being composed exclusively from 1 sample of the Big Ben clock in London. Kennedy wanted to use a Bell sound because of the range of harmonic content available in them and proceeded to electronically manipulate the sound in many ways (slowing it down, speeding it up, pitch shifting it etc) often to extreme lengths in order to create the dreamy soundscape heard in the piece. Due to the nature of the source sound, no Root tone, key, rhythm or harmony can be discerned throughout and this was part of the experiment for Kennedy in seeing whether an emotive listening experience could be created from pure 'sound' alone, rather than relying on more traditional techniques such as chords, melody & rhythm. Other techniques used include Doppler, panning & Binaural beats.