As I mentioned in my last post, most of my recent music projects have been related to the Lines Community Remix Projects, quarterly composition compilations based on themes suggested by community members, and, as a result, I have not been posting here as much. Starting with this post, I intend to link to that output going forward and may, if I can make the time, do a future post linking and providing comments for the three previous pieces I did with the LCRP. The last one, completed for the December solstice, was based on a theme I submitted speculating on music made by non-human, and possibly inorganic, life forms.
Originally, I had the thought of exploring sounds in the ground, e.g., music that might be made by beings inhabiting rocks and regolith (as opposed to the spaces between them). After much conceptual wandering, I decided upon a specific aspect of this idea based on the fact that, about 2 ½ hours from my home, there is a park called Ringing Rocks in which there is a boulder field comprised of stones from a glacial moraine, some of which ring like bells when struck. I imagined this field as a geological community, stones that have “lived” together since the last Ice Age: How might they communicate? How might they entertain themselves?
The actual geology and acoustics of the ringing rocks are fascinating: according to Wikipedia, researchers have been unable to identify what quality or qualities the stones possess that produce this phenomenon -- neither molecular composition, crystalline structure, nor other properties show clear, consistent association with it. (There are apparently several geological units in the world that produce such stones and they all seem to be made of different stuff.) In fact, based on what I can glean from my visits to the park, a given rock might ring one day and not another; go figure.
I recorded a dozen different rocks using a pair of piezo contact mics attached by inserting them under a strap tightened around each stone. All of the stones were far larger than I could move and most larger than me -- indeed, it is a field of boulders in the truest sense, with few chunks small enough to pick up -- so this entailed a fair bit of clambering about. I used two different hammers on some of the stones (having thought to bring a second only on a later trip): all stones were sampled with a deadblow hammer and I additionally used a tack hammer on five.
Back in the studio, my intention was to leave the samples as unmanipulated as possible. Some samples needed a high-pass filter clean up, as my placement of the strap on a few of the rocks produced some low-frequency artifacts, but the tones the stones produce had few or no frequencies below about 200 Hz, so that was an easy cut. In order to create the “hum” that I imagined the stones’ “spirits” capable of, I greatly stretched some select hits, but was still able to retain the pitch and timbre satisfactorily. Pan is artifactual, being a function of the amplitude of the stone's vibration at the point where each mic was placed, which was, in turn, a function of where I could get the strap to stay put; with most samples, I left this unchanged, as it was analogous to the way the boulders were scattered about the field. The only other manipulation was to add some reverb to each sample so as to mimic the acoustics of the boulder field and give each hit a location in the recording analogous to the sense one gets standing there, listening as fellow visitors bang and clang around one. The sound you hear in this recording is therefore as faithful to the sound of the stones in situ as I could render.
In terms of the musical structure, I guessed that it might be an interesting challenge for stones to ring against each other in sequence, given their geographic distribution (imagine a bell choir with its members scattered across a few acres). Thus, the music that I made with these sounds ends up sounding very human, but if one visualizes the moraine and places oneself in its center -- as I’ve tried to manifest with the mix -- one can imagine a community of stones enacting an ancient ritual together. While I definitely don’t intend to imply that such a community would inevitably develop quasi-Reichian or pseudo-Afro-Cuban musical structures, I do think it's fair to imagine that they might: insects, dinosaurs, birds, mammals, and even fish have all independently evolved wings, given the nature of air, so non-human doesn't have to mean anti-human. And, in any case, further thought after completing this piece has led me to imagine other things ringing rocks might do in their spare time, which I hope to explore in a future piece.
Technical notes: I used a Zoom H4N Pro field recorder with very cheap piezo contact mics (stripped down to bare metal from their cheezy plastic cases) for recording. Samples were processed in Ableton Live 9, including stretching, and Valhalla VintageVerb was used to recreate the ambience of the park.
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