Katie Gately On Making Music With Environmental Sounds

This video, via Ableton, offers a profile of LA-based producer and sound designer Katie Gately.

It follows Gately around LA, as she records environmental sounds, explores the evolution of her creative process and shows how she incorporates field recordings and voice to create her signature mixture of beats, vocals and electronic textures.

In the second video, Gately demonstrates some of her methods for processing and transforming sounds in Ableton Live.

23 thoughts on “Katie Gately On Making Music With Environmental Sounds”

  2. I have used whatever technology I could over the years to sound collect(it gets quite addicting lol), and even though I have owned a few Tascam portable recorders, I tend to use my iPhones way more as they are always with me and I end up mangling everything in the computer anyway so iPhone quality is just fine for me. Enjoyed this video and her perspective on field recording.

  3. boring. not interested, because she herself makes the noises, mostly one-shots. the real artists are the soundscapers who create musical, groovy loops out of *continous* field recordings. she doesn´t do that. from a standpoint of a musician/composer sound *collecting* is not a creative process.

    2. Can’t collecting sounds be seen as creating a palette of sounds for later use?

      ‘Real Artists’? Really?!! This just sounds incredibly pompous.

      1. It’s not only pompous — it’s also sexist and typical. Look at other synthopia posts about female artists and you see the same style of dismissive posts.

    3. You sound like another sexist male in the synth community.

      Let’s hear your sounds. Post them on here so we can turn our critical eye on you and learn what real sound art is.

    4. Have you heard her music? I’m listening on spotify right now and it’s amazing.
      To say she’s not an artist is just ignorant.

  5. Early sampling adopters such as Peter Gabriel, Art of Noise, Depeche Mode (to only name a few) recorded whole music albums using lots of environmental sounds almost 40 years ago, so this is hardly anything groundbreaking. But I still enjoyed watching this video and thought it was refreshing to see there are still people out there willing to put in some serious elbow grease to create cool and unique sounds in a world where gazillions of generic presets are only a short mouse-click away.

    1. lol

      what’s with thinking that everything has to be groundbreaking in order to be interesting?

      also – all the artists you mentioned were decades late to the game….but still did interesting work.

  6. Dissect anything fun and it just looks dumb. I think the point is just that in her experience she enjoys finding sounds in the world around her.
    An artists work usually becomes
    everything to them, their whole
    world, so they tend to
    talk about it like
    it’s monumental
    because it is
    to them.

    No?

    (Written as an artist and probably read by an artist)

    The debate may take it further away as an intellectual sport but it won’t
    touch what it is getting immersed in creation

  7. Thanks for the insight, I wish her all the best and great success. This is one true artist!
    I would really like to jam with her.
    To the bitter comments above: you are a sad bunch of biowaste.

  9. Loving all the sounds in the videos congrats to Moog for this awesomeness!!
    Can’t wait to try one was hoping they would release this !!!

  13. Really enjoyed her music. Something otherwordly and very unique about her sound. Which, of course, comes from not using the same soundsets many other musicians are using. Making your own sounds from scratch is inspiring, especially since the world is full of sounds. Not just the ones that come out of synthesizers when you turn a know or two. Loved especially “Tuck” when I listened to it in Spotify. Would love to collaborate with her some day 🙂

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