The shores and waters of Lake Superior can change dramatically from day to day. After two days of calm, the lake revolted with waves of ice crashing against the rocky shoreline. I have never heard such a sound and eagerly made a recording. These waves were literally made up of water and densely packed plates of ice. When each wave would crest, shards of ice clattered down the trough of the wave, and when they reached the shore the plates of ice would shatter against the rocks.
Waves of Ice
This is one of my favorite PCM-D50 recordings so far. Once again, there was a very still evening after the snow had fallen. At the shore small rivulets of snow melt dribbled into the lake.
I put the recorder on a rock pointing toward the ensemble of water droplets and captured about six minutes of this musical sound. Here’s one minute and thirty three seconds of what I acquired.
Snow Melting
I rarely experience the near silence of still, late nights in remote areas like the Northern shore of Lake Superior. The quiet was amplified (is that an oxymoron?) by a two inch layer of fresh snow that seemed to absorb the outdoor ambience. The lake was as still as I’ve ever seen it. The combination of these factors made it possible to actually hear the snow falling. You can identify the sound of the snow falling as a high frequency crackling as the flakes touched down on my surroundings. The large wet flakes sound similar to rain. There’s also an irregular, low frequency thumping sound that might be plates of ice gently bumping into each other on the lake.
Snow Falling
Here’s a video of me playing with my Gestural Music Sequencer. I’ll upload a better version at some point, but I think you can a least get a sense of how you might use this kind of tool (I’m talking about the sequencer, not the performer). As you can see the video has been mirrored so it’s easier to follow your own movements.
To reiterate how the sequencer works, the X axis of the brightest pixel is used to determine the pitch, while the Y axis is the dynamics. The application outputs MIDI data that I’m routing to Reason. I’ve programmed the up and down arrows on the keyboard to increase or decrease a multiplier that along with the 15 fps frame rate determines the time between each note on event. I’ve also enabled a group of keys to adjust the transposition.
I have recently added keyboard controls to dynamically set the transposition in my Gestural Music Sequencer. I set it up like a piano keyboard, so that “Q” is the key of C, “2” is C sharp and so on. In this example I have the application set to to play a minor pentatonic scale. This makes it quite clear when the key changes. In this case I’m modulating between C and F sharp. I also started with a slower note duration, then switched to a faster one. I would not classify this as a very musical performance. This was part of a test to make sure that all of the transposition key controls were operating properly.
Transposition Controls (C to F# Modulation)