For Halsey

Worked on in 2017, rendered into an audio installation in 2019/2020. Presented as either a fixed media work or an audio installation.

Dedicated to my beautiful baby niece.

all the sounds used in this piece are baby coos and giggles that I processed, pitched around, added more stuff to than I can recall (I wish I could remember or would have taken notes- I would use these sorts of sounds with a lot of stuff). Originally, I used these sounds for the final section of Dad’s White Pontiac (fixed media, 2017), but once I heard them, I knew that it was a sound-world I wanted to explore further. The result all this tinkering were very nostalgic, almost a sad and yearning quality. I think it’s beautiful, especially when listened to on a large and all-encompassing sound system. The piece takes me somewhere and allows me to daydream, something I feel that I don’t do enough these days.

The changing presentation of this piece has been fun; since I made these sounds in Spring of 2017, they have been coming back into my life again and again in weird ways. I’ve always been a big fan of Brian Eno’s work, and at the time of making these sounds I had just written a substantial (albeit, a not-very-good) paper on Eno’s Reflection, so I had been reading about generative music and Eno’s brand of ambient music a lot. Originally, I wanted this to just be a fixed media piece on its own, and I would edit, reformat, and reorganize the tracks over and over trying to get a flow that I liked, but every time I did, I would find a new way of organizing that I liked just as much or a new way of structuring in stems that I enjoyed. Every time the piece had an opportunity to be presented somewhere, I would change the structure, come up with some new schematic and send a “new version of the piece” to whoever wanted it.

Still, there is a big part of me that wishes I could do more audio installations (hit, hit), so I decided this might be the best place to give it a try.

My biggest dead-end with installations has been materials, and a lack of know-how on my part. Both with this piece, and my other installation Chimes (2020), I had big plans for a physical sculpture that would accompany the work; lots of materials, something really physical, but soft and comfortable. Well… how? Where? When? Who? How much will it cost? Again and again, these issues came up: how would you build it? Max patch? Are you going to leave your laptop at a museum for 2 months? I never took a course on this stuff, and I’ve never had any real guidance on how to do it, so my interest would always fizzle out and I would move on.

Eventually, I figured out how to make a MAX patch that could play the files in random and ever-changing orders, and would do various new processes to the audio files themselves. Finally, in winter of 2019, I had a version of the piece that could be presented in a closer format to what I had originally wanted: ever-changing, continuous, not really generative but close enough! This was supposed to be presented at SEAMUS 2020, possibly in The Rotunda at the University of Virginia; my memory of the exact location is fuzzy because the whole thing was canceled and moved online when the Pandemic broke out. From there, various versions of the piece began to pop up in fixed formats: “sonic murals” with or without video, online presentations, etc. I spent quite a while trying to get this piece released on an album or something, but that never really panned out… one day!

All that goes to say that this piece has come with me on a bit of a journey. I like listening to it when it comes up, and I look forward to seeing what happens to it in the future.