Digital technology has allowed artists to go much, much further in drawing inspiration from nature. One Minneapolis artist uses digitally generated sound designs to create a kind of hypnosis on headphones. The source of the sound? Water.
Minnesota Public Radio's Chris Roberts reports.
[RAINDROPS HITTING ROOF] CHRIS ROBERTS: This is Mike Hallenbeck's recording of raindrops pummeling the metal back porch roof of his home in Minneapolis. He calls it Splat On a Not Tin Roof, the third track on his new experimental CD, Immersion Water Works. For some, the sound of rain hitting a roof is a familiar, comforting refrain of summer. For Hallenbeck, it represents a world of possibilities waiting to be revealed.
MIKE HALLENBECK: What I'm interested in is exploring the qualities that are located within a sound itself. I'm not that interested in manipulating things. I'm interested in unlocking the potential of a certain sound and sort of being able to excavate what's already there.
CHRIS ROBERTS: Hallenbeck is better known for his songwriting and music-making than his field recordings. He was a founding member of the defunct Twin Cities acoustic rock band Pimentos for Gus and is taking a sabbatical from his group, Mike Merz And The Can of Worms. But he's also had a growing fascination with sounds and the ways humans hear them. His trusty Sony MiniDisc recorder and stereo microphone have almost become additional appendages.
Hallenbeck's friend, Bryce Beverlin, operates Insides Music, an experimental record label in Minneapolis. Beverlin is a fan of Hallenbeck's sound montages and wanted him to put together a full-length CD on any subject of his choosing. Hallenbeck picked water.
[WATER GUSHING]
MIKE HALLENBECK: Water really appealed to me as a subject because, for me, it contains all of the musicality within it and its various forms. You have melody, you have harmony, you have rhythm, you have various tonal qualities. You have different movements as the water moves into different forms. You have the seasons that facilitate all the changes in it. And within all of these sounds, you have an amazing variety of textures and different sorts of movements occurring. So it just seemed like really rich subject matter for me.
CHRIS ROBERTS: Some of the tracks on Hallenbeck's new CD are straight-ahead recordings of water in its various manifestations. There's lake water lapping under a dock, snow being crunched like Styrofoam underfoot, or being scraped off a sidewalk by a shovel.
[SHOVEL SCRAPING SNOW]
Hallenbeck also digitally dissects those sounds and makes long-form abstractions out of them, transporting the listener to new sonic environments.
[DIGITALLY SLOWED SCRAPING SOUNDS]
Can you describe what you're actually doing digitally to these sounds?
MIKE HALLENBECK: The processes that I use are really not all that sophisticated. And that's intentional, because I'm not looking to mess with the sounds. I'm looking to draw out of them what is beautiful.
A lot of the methods that I use have been around for a long time. My favorite method is slowing down the sounds to reveal what's in there that you don't hear on the surface. And then, there's the idea of taking a very small sample and just examining it microscopically, folding the pitches over and sort of combing back and forth over it and creating an entire sound field out of just a very small instant of sound.
CHRIS ROBERTS: Do you think what you're doing is art? Or are you an archivist of nature?
MIKE HALLENBECK: There's a little of both. There's often debate over what the line is between sound and music. And that line doesn't really concern me at all. When you work with sound for a long time, you start to experience anything sonic as essentially one experience.
[GARBLED SOUNDS]
I look at this kind of a project as a way to have a dialogue with the world musically. It seems to me that the roots of music may lie in human beings wanting to talk back to what they're hearing in nature, in the world, and these days, in technology and machines. So the idea of using the actual sounds or imprints of the sounds now seems like a logical extension of that, as far as making music goes.
[GARBLED SOUNDS]
CHRIS ROBERTS: Hallenbeck doesn't profess to being a sound artist pioneer, nor does he have any bold ambition for his new CD. He hopes whoever listens to it gets more enjoyment from the world around them, and perhaps joins him in the realization that every aural experience is unique. I'm Chris Roberts, Minnesota Public Radio.
[GARBLED SOUNDS]
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