During the summers of 2018 and 2019, I spent time at the Anheuser-Busch Coastal Research Center (Oyster, Virginia), recording sounds including oyster reefs. Since that experience, I have thought about my lifelong relationship to water: trips to the beach as a child, a fear of deep, dark water (thalassophobia), recent collaboration with environmental scientists researching sea life, and, of course, the rising of our oceans as a function of global warming.
All of these experiences swirled around compositionally for a year or two, until I began working on this piece in earnest during the beginning of 2021, while holed up in Oberlin, Ohio during the COVID-19 pandemic. Creating this work, I challenged myself in several ways: to use a completely higher-order ambisonic workflow, to incorporate recorded or sampled instruments in each section, and to work in a number of different electroacoustic styles. The resulting work is for full 3D fifth-order higher order ambisonics, presented here as an ambisonic UHJ render and a cross-pattern coherence-driven binaural decoding (headphones only).
Includes performance recordings of David Bowlin, violin, Kate Copeland, soprano, and Kevin William Davis, cello.
This work has four sections:
I. The Bay (Of Trains and Shorebirds)
w/ solo violin
II. The Reef (Of Predator and Prey)
w/ cello, piano, glockenspiel
III. The Ocean (The Lull of the Sirens)
w/ soprano soloists, choir
IV. The Deep (Beneath the Rain)
w/ string quartet, orchestra