The sound which begins this composition is a looped portion of a longer field recording that I captured near latitude: 28.8048 and longitude -80.8606 about this time last year. This area in Florida is a challenging place to record as there is a significant amount of both terrestrial and aquatic noise pollution from cars, boats, and um, rockets. This was captured within the grounds held by NASA and the ecosystem is a fascinating mashup of both fresh and saltwater marshes, pools, and streams. This particular hydrophone recording comes from a small inland lagoon of brackish water. When I dropped the microphones in, I was happy to see a bunch of the fish and crustaceans appear to find them interesting, brush up to them with their fins or tapping them with their claws. All of the pops and clicks heard are from them messing with the hydrophones. I was also surprised to hear that our voices from above the water could be clearly perceived and captured by the hydrophones. On reflection, I imagine that their world must be excessively loud and noisey thanks in large part to human interactions.
My interpretation of the assignment this week, to start with a drone and slowly reveal its constituent parts, made me immediately begin to think in terms of pointillism in painting where many small dots create a larger form when viewed from a distant point. I thought about distinct periodic elements in sound being disguised by altering both duration (decay, sustain, and release) and slewing pitch to remove any distinguishable pitch differential. Rhythmic patterns morph into more nebulous washes through repeated listening to me. So I started with things as smeared as possible as the drone, and quickly allowed the two component voices to identify themselves through both their inherent rhythmic pattern and their timbral centers. Eventually two distinct patterns emerge in the left and right stereo fields. But, they extend too far, and again become diffuse as their timbral centers sustain longer and longer. Turning into a drone yet again. The coda is the unaltered field recording unlooped.
More on this 240th weekly Disquiet Junto project — “Compose a piece of music in which a drone slowly, imperceptibly, gives way to something rhythmic and/or melodic” — at:
http://disquiet.com/0240/
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http://disquiet.com/junto/
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