THE SPHERES
Seattle, 2018
For this permanent installation at Amazon’s The Spheres conversatory, I composed a generative music soundscape.
Working with Belle & Wissell interactive developer Scott Thiessen, I created a system of music that behaves like a cloud forest ecosystem. There's a long, undulating bed of tones created by bowing a marimba- akin to the ambient role of mist and wind on leaves. Layered on top of this bed are short musical phrases that play the role of the conversation that birds, insects and animals have all day and night. These short bursts create a call-and-response effect- the sound sources are as diverse as the international latitudes where cloud forests can be found: Indonesian gamelan bells, Malaysian gopichands, Andean guitars, vocal effects, flutes from around the world, etc.
To create a soundscape that is both generative (always changing, never repeating) and musical (has emotional narrative and not random feeling), Belle & Wissell and I came up with this system:
Generative Composition Audio Engine
long blue wave shows the relative volume of the bowed marimba bed
green bars are the short phrases that come in and out to create an ever-changing musical conversation
long green wave shows the density of those phrases.
In addition to the generative soundscape I composed several pieces to accompany a series of short vignettes that show tours through different part of the Spheres building:
To learn more about the Understory installation please visit Belle & Wissell and Seattle Spheres. Here's a short documentary that shows an overview:
