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Sound Clip: Cave Study by Ryan Lautenbacher
This project titled ‘A Cave Study’ is a an exploration into site-specific sculptural sound and investigates the acoustic properties and the natural sculptural objects within an environment or space. The project is based around field recordings created during a recent trip to Thailand. Specifically those captured within ‘Diamond Cave’ in the province of Ao Nang. The piece is an exploration into the realms of minimalism, temporality and spatiality, with a focus on conceptual terms such as: materiality, timbre, space, physicality, density, process and production.
The technical context behind the piece is to use one source of audio from the site-specific sculptural objects and processed the audio through one method of synthesis, in this case I choose granular synthesis. Through this process of granular synthesis using the one sound source, I created over twenty different audio files and composed the piece only using envelope sculpting and volume automation to arrange and create the composition.
Really nice work! For such a minimalistic piece you have managed to maintain a really strong sense of tension. It’s be interesting to hear the original field recording file that you used.
I am happy to share the original recordings (I will leave a msg on your sounds-like-noise site). The source material was created by tapping on the stalactites within the cave, these stalactites had amazing bell type resonances. The length, width and general size of the stalactites all affected the frequency information I was able to capture. Also the acoustic properties of the cave impacted greatly upon the original recordings, and in turn the final composition.
very cool. nice work
I was interested in your comments about the indelible impact of the acoustic properties of the instruments (stalactites), and the location. I would like to suggest that these affects are in turn largely governed by decisions made by the recordist at the point of capture: for example, whether one uses contact mics and/or mics out in the air, and the placement and relative balance of these. There is also the consideration of the necessary physical interaction with the sound sources if, as in this case, they are not apparently self-sounding. These decisions might be carefully planned, or arrived at upon initial listening, or indeed totally arbitrary. However, the resulting representation, or relocation of the sound object depends entirely upon them. It is often the bane of the field recordist that particular qualities of a sound heard in situ might be absent or diminished in a recording of the sound. Even if the sound is eventually mangled beyond all recognition through processing, resynthesis, or whatever, it can be very pleasing as an artist to still hear the essence of a particular timbre from the source, as is the case here.
This piece is a good listen. It is one thing to make and modify field recordings, but to organise these into a cohesive piece with a consistent timbre and solid form is another. Nice work.
B