Lookout Creek: Eighth Notes
Lookout Creek: Eighth Notes
This work is modeled after former HJA resident Leah Wilson’s work, Ambient (2014), which hangs on the wall outside the apartment I stayed in at HJA. Andrews researcher Fred Swanson suggested that I create an audio piece based on her approach. Leah had examined and represented the reflections of light and color in and around a small stone placed in the stream. I became excited about this idea of looking at one physical space and taking readings/documentation of the myriad of sonic textures, pitches and combinations that can occur in that one point – and thus making a tangible representation of what might ordinarily seem like an indecipherable stream of noise.
Through this work I have thought about the immense musicality of stream acoustics, how we might grow more familiar with each stream site’s acoustic details through isolation and repetition. I re-visited Leah’s approximate sampling site on Lookout Creek, at the water gage. I placed a Hydrophone in one spot on a flat rock at the stream bottom and took one 10 second recording every two minutes. From each 10 second sample, I extracted 4 recordings of eighth-note value at set points across samples and built a loop of each eighth note set. The composition begins with the 1st sample’s loop, and moves through each subsequent loop, with sections of overlap between each consecutive pair. I did not affect or process the sounds beyond using an equalizer and adding a touch of reverb. Anthony Brisson did the final mastering of this work.
