Glassy Metals

A continuation of my fascination with the sounds of metal objects, Glassy Metals explores the sounds of tungsten filaments in burned out incandescent light bulbs, magnetic (iron oxide) tape rushing across a head stack, small ball bearings, ball chains of various sizes, sheet metal, tiny gear motors, bikes, BART (which permeates the sonic landscape of the San Francisco Bay Area), freight trains, and other metal objects.

Some sounds are used in their raw state; others, such as the BART train, which now sounds like the wind, are transformed beyond recognition. Selecting only small portions of the spectrums of several sources and layering them results in new constructs with constantly fluctuating details. The ending exaggerates these perturbations, as sources emerge from the texture and fold back in as if they are fluttering insects hovering close by briefly, then flitting away, only to return later. Although several sources are cyclic, none are precisely so, nor are they synchronous with other sources combined in the layers, so apparent synchronous relationships occur only briefly, then drift apart. Glassy Metals takes its title from non-crystalline (amorphous) metallic materials.