Mimesis

Reimagined by Michael Lawrence. 

I like to point out the similarities between nature and human ingenuity--man-made things. After the original soundtrack plays all the way through as an exposition, the development begins with a recording of traffic driving through light snow that I had from last winter. Then the composition moves on to a coffee maker. Both of these sounds in my opinion mimic the randomness of waves coming ashore. A listener caught off guard might also mistake the coffee maker for thunder, at least at first. Even seeming randomness has order, though. So I found rhythms first in the Thai waves, then in the traffic noise and looped them in the development in order to highlight them. In the conclusion, the original file plays again in full as the coffee maker wraps up. My hope is that at this point the previously highlighted rhythms will now stand out more to the listener. A small gong, a part of the Wanamaker organ, the largest pipe organ in the world, articulates the transitions from the exposition to the development and from the development to the conclusion. I included a gong since it's an instrument I readily associate with the Far East. I've called it Mimesis, which in Greek means imitation, a reference to the way man-made things often imitate nature. 

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

Photo by Maxwell Gifted on Unsplash