Unquiet Ice

Marc Weidenbaum runs a weekly composition project I've wanted to participate in for some time called the disquiet junto.  I've made several attempts to submit projects before the deadline, but have consistently failed -- until today.  I'm pleased finally to join the ranks of the musicians whose workflow is such that they can get a piece put together and posted in less than four days.  This week's project involved sampling ice cubes in a glass; here's my entry:



Adding some detail to my brief post on the Lines forum, I used the same piezo mics I used at Ringing Rocks -- in two cases the exact same -- except two of them I dipped in Plastidip to make simple hydrophones.  They were experiments and work well enough:  they are less sensitive generally and lose pretty much all response below about 100Hz, but for these purposes they were fine.  The un-dipped piezo's I taped to the outside of the glass, which worked better than I thought -- in fact, I discovered later that the mics and the glass together were sensitive enough to pick up ambient voices in the kitchen, where I was working, and adjacent dining room!

I poured soda into the glass at one point.  I didn't like the harshness of the dry cubes in the glass and wanted the squeak and thrum of the air leaking out of the cubes as they melted in the water, as well as the bubbles of CO2 condensing out and popping (have you ever listened to your soda?).  The final piece has a through-track that is a couple layered recordings of that sound.

This is the first use of a [buffer~]-based sample scrambler that took me essentially all of 2018 to design and build (it sat for a few months between mid-October and late December).  My intention was to use it for a viola piece, which I still plan on doing, but it also turned out to be perfect for what I wanted at the end of this.  That bit that sounds sort of like a delay is actually the scrambler:  listen closely and you can hear that the sound is played back both forward and backward at different pitches.