Composing with Found Sounds, Instructor: Kirk Pearson

Tag: Event Calendar

Date and Time

• Sunday, Nov 16, 2025  12pm - 4pm

Location

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Details

Composing with Found Sounds
Instructor: Kirk Pearson
Sunday, November 16, 2025
12-4pm
In-person at Shapeshifters Cinema
Admission: $55 (Discount for Shapeshifters members)

How can the textures of a city become the basis for composition? This collaborative workshop between Dogbotic Labs and Shapeshifters Cinema invites participants to explore the acoustic life of Oakland through the lens of sound as material. Rather than beginning with instruments, we’ll begin with the act of listening: tracing how the built environment, weather, and human activity form a constantly shifting score around us, and then learn practically how to structure larger musical ideas out of found sounds in ways that are novel and poetic.

Participants will make short field recordings in the neighborhood, guided by prompts that emphasize attention, timing, and perspective. Back at Shapeshifters, we’ll share these recordings and explore simple ways to work with them--cutting, arranging, layering, and using structure to draw out the music already present in the noise.

The workshop is open to anyone interested in sound, whether or not you consider yourself a musician. By the end of the session, we’ll have assembled a collective composition shaped by the city’s own voice, and compiled an impressive sample library of downtown Oakland.