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This recording was constructed from from a series of processes applied to and arising from hydrophone recordings made in the Mississippi river between February and June of 2024. The recorder was programmed to record for 10 minutes each day at dawn, midday, dusk, and during the middle of the night.
From those recordings, we constructed a base mixture which layered segments from each day at each recording period, so that the sounds move in roughly ten minute segments from midnight, to dawn, midday and finally dusk. Each segment compresses the span of days and months vertically into a single mixture.
The base mixture was then played back through transducers attached to panels on the top and bottom of an upright piano and re-recorded.
We composed a sound layer in response to the hydrophone mixture which was itself a mixture of alternating layers of a generative synthesis routine on the modular synthesizer and a routine on the computer which convolved and re-processed the synthesizer along with segments of the hydrophone recordings. That in turn was recorded through the piano.
Finally, the hydrophone and synthesizer parts recorded through the piano were mixed again with the direct hydrophone and sculpted into the final mixture of fish vocalizations, boats, unidentified underwater systems, generated tones and piano resonance.