White Turbulence

When I first started thinking about this piece, I thought it might be interesting to have water as a unifying theme. I recorded many sounds involving water with microphones and hydrophones and processed them using phase vocoding, convolving, and extreme equalization. As I started putting the piece together, I thought it might be playful to incorporate some obvious quadraphonic effects (the convolved airplane at the beginning) in addition to the more subtle spatialization techniques I used such as continuously varying phase relationships. Other sounds include waves lapping against the shore, an old toilet tank slowly filling with water, a brass ball spinning very fast in a stainless steel bowl with a small amount of water, etc. There is a mix of recognizable (although processed) sounds and sounds processed beyond recognition. While working on this piece I recalled the difficulty of layering complex sounds which were spatially oriented with other complex sounds of another spatial orientation. The space tends to become confused or to simply collapse when layering the sounds. This piece is therefore reminiscent of many of my early quadraphonic pieces (1973-1985) which are more episodic rather than thickly layered.