rocks & feedback loops: making music for Space Between

excerpt from Boulder / Tree / Wall (Matt Sargent & JT Kirkland)

The link above is the current version of my audio contribution to our Art-o-matic presentation of Space Between.  The music functions very similarly to the process of JT’s photo contribution to the project.  In JT’s photos, he uses extreme close-ups of natural surfaces (rock, bark, and a brick wall), and then very gradually adds saturation to the photos over a long period of time (I believe in this installation in the range of 20-30 photos, each with the saturation gradually turned up, from 0% to 100%).

I created this piece above, using a similar process.  I used a repeated sample consisting of very small brownstone pebbles, collected in a rather pastoral part of Connecticut where I teach music lessons.  The pebbles are gently scattered onto a large plank of wood, wired up with a contact mic.  This sample is repeated over about 13 minutes.  As the recording repeats, my computer gradually sends more of the signal through a web of granular synthesis objects (essentially, taking the rock sound and breaking into many minute sounds at once — rock to sand).  They are arranged in a feedback loop method, so that as the saturation grows, it feeds into itself, creating an even greater sonic effect, which by the end is essentially self-oscillating.

It was a wonderful challenge working in such a linear way.  Most of my own composing work is very nit-picky and precise in process, so I tried to maintain the slow-growth mentality throughout, letting the process speak for itself without my own doctoring.