After a hiatus in January, I am now working more or less full-time on this project. I had a wonderful interview with Sara Friedl-Putnam, who is writing a piece on “Talking Trees” for an upcoming issue of Inspired magazine, a regional arts monthly. One of her observations was that based on her perusal of this blog, it appeared that this project was all about technology and not so much about music. I’ve been attempting to temper that imbalance, and over the past week, I’ve been working closely with the sound files Harvey and I recorded at Seed Savers last spring.

Essentially, there are four main sound sources I hear on these recordings: birds (lots and lots of them), water (rain and a stream), frogs, and insects (just a wayward fly buzzing here and there). These suggest a structure, so I’ve been doing some preliminary tinkering on the frogs and insect sounds. What I’ve posted below is a one-minute sample of a loop that gradually changes through the addition of a band pass filter and some reverb. As it turns out, both the frogs and the fly resonate at a pitch that hovers around C, so it wasn’t tough to find some nice harmonic drones buried in the texture.

I’ve only heard these sound files through headphones, so the next step will be to test the sounds with one of my pairs of motorcycle speakers.

Buzzing
Frogs