This is an album of ambient/experimental music that I recorded in the summer. It was more of a conceptual piece than a collection of music that I worked on for any real period of time.
I had moved into a new house recently and had been noticing that summer that the cicadas were very loud during the day in June and early July. In the evening, they would die down as the sun set and would be replaced by crickets at night. I didn't particularly like the sound of the cicadas since I felt like they were a constant reminder of the heat of the summer. But I did like how distinct the change in soundscape was on a daily schedule. So I was thinking about that aspect, plus trying to appreciate the sound of the cicadas for what it was.
The piece is a generative composition that creates music based on the nature sounds that are recorded in real time. I set up a microphone just outside my backdoor to pick up the sounds of cidasas, crickets, planes passing overhead, dogs barcking, etc. Then I fed the audio feed into my modular synthesizer and set up a patch that would generate music based on the incoming audio. It was important to me that the music generated wasn't just from sampling the incoming audio. Instead I used a range of techniques to make the patch "respond" to the incoming audio without just playing it back. To do this, I used envelope followers, FM synthesis, resonant filter banks, and digital sampling of pitch.
I originally had wanted to record a 24-hour piece of music that would shift and change with the shifting sonic landscape outside. However, there were some technical limitations that I ran into there, so I opted to take 3 different recordings at certain times of day when soundscape was transitioning or changing and release them as tracks, named with their timestamp.