Sign 1
(to the right of the seabirds)
Track 1:
Seabird Song
This song is an ode to the ingenuity of seabirds living along Lake Erie, including the Bonaparte’s Gull, Herring Gull, Common Tern, Least Tern, Black Tern, Ring-billed Gull, and Great Black-Backed Gull, all displayed here. Even though gulls and terns are technically sea birds, they are able to thrive in a multitude of environments, including our great lake. The primary audio sources for this piece are hydrophone (a microphone built for recording underwater) recordings from Lake Erie, taken while gulls and terns were flying overhead.
Even though the lake is not a sea, it still has significant waves, which contain a great deal of auditory information. These particular recordings include marimba-like notes of the water splashing in and out of the rocks along the breakwall. I built this song upon the natural melodies found here, and transcribed them for marimba.
Track 2:
Singing Moss
While recording in Lake Erie, I came upon a sound that I thought at first was mechanical noise from the recorder, or a glitch in my headphones. However, as I moved the hydrophone around, I noticed that this hum grew louder as I drew closer to a large patch of thick moss, and realized it was the beautiful whine of a multitude of tiny bubbles of oxygen being produced by the moss.
In this piece, I’ve processed the audio such that the moss’s “song” emerges gradually out of an underwater soundscape.
