Shadow Flurries

Reimagined by Alison Hight.

"I wanted to capture the holistic sense of the ebb and flow of the crickets’ song: the pauses, the shifts, the call and response; while also capturing the intersection of external stimuli with the crickets’ world. The steady drone of the cricket song was a central building block, with various tones pulled out to recreate some of the polyrhythms that naturally evolve from the chorus of crickets singing their own individual rhythms. Something fascinating about the source material is the fact that the very act of being there to record the audio shapes the sounds of the environment – the crickets were at some point singing about the presence of the human threat that came to visit them. There’s something really interesting about the fact that my response to the cricket audio is a response to their response to another person – it’s impossible to not simultaneously affect and be affected by everything in the environment. When putting this piece together I treated it like a conversation between the crickets and me; ostensibly between me, the crickets, and this other person somewhere out there who recorded it; and ultimately, between the whole lot of us and anyone who might listen to it. I wanted to champion the voice of the crickets so that in this piece they’re as much a part of the conversation as anyone else who joins in."

Part of the Sounding Nature project - for more information, see http://www.citiesandmemory.com/sounding-nature

Photo by Heiko Haller on Unsplash