WHAT THE WATERS TOLD ME (2022)
a soundscape composition for eight digital soundtracks

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If we listen carefully to flowing water in all of its varied forms, we may begin to hear voices and ascribe human emotions to them. The voices may be argumentative, even angry, as at the start of our journey, but suddenly they become hushed as we enter a large cavern. A mysterious voice seems to give us commands as we await the next stage, while ethereal voices guide us along. The commands become more insistent until the waters burst forth with transcendent song in a celebration of water and life.

What The Waters Told Me is available on sonus.ca

Original recordings from the WSP Recording Collection, David Monacchi's cistern recordings and the composer's cellphone recordings. Sound processing realized with Soundhack convolution, with spatialization created by Harmonic Functions’ TiMax2 matrix mixer, marketed by Outboard Inc (UK). No granulation techniques were used in this piece.

Production Materials

A number of different source files were convolved with each other in pairs (i.e. hybrid convolution) with a "moving window" in the microsound range, i.e. 100 ms for the left channel, 50 ms for the right channel, thereby creating pseudo stereo output files. Fourteen blocks of 4 to 8 stereo convolved files were then pre-mixed together to form the basic building blocks of the piece, as documented in the links of this table. The file "T_AWell" is a processed text spoken by Thecla Schiphorst, and originally used in Song of Songs. The Cathedral Impulse Responses (IR) are derived from the final chord of a music performance in Salzburg Cathedral, as originally used in Infinity Room.

	Creek1A Creek1A	Creek1BC Creek1B Creek1C	Water Water1 Water4 Rain	Well Well Splashes	Trickle Trickle1 Trickle2	T_AWell T_AWell*self T_AWell*self*self	Cathedral IR Cathedral IR1 Cathedral IR2
Rain Rain1 Rain3		Rain*Creek1BC	Rain*Water	Rain*Well	Rain*Trickle	Rain*T_AWell	Rain*Cathedral IR
Water Water1 Water4	Creek1A*Water	Water*Creek1BC Water*Creek1BC-2oct		Water*Well	Water*Trickle	Water*T_AWell	Water*Cathedral IR
Text Text1 Text2				WellSplashes*Text

In addition, a selection of original files are auto-convolved (with the same microlevel moving windows) in another building block as seen here: Water*self.

PRODUCTION SCORE

	PART ONE (0:00-3:10)	PART TWO (3:08-8:00)	PART THREE (8:00-11:37)
Production Score	Part 1	Part 2	Part 3
ProTools Session & Levels	Score   Levels	Score   Levels	Score   Levels
Stereo Mixdown	Part 1	Part 2	Part 3
Spectrogram	Part 1	Part 2A Part 2B	Part 3

SPATIALIZATION

In the Production Scores, the 8-channel blocks that are spatialized with the TiMax2 are identified in red, and use the patterns indicated as DelRamp1, DelV1 and Echo1 which work in trajectories going from leading channel 1 through to 8 and then repeating at steps identified in the Production Score, e.g. 2 or 4 sec. Each of these patterns includes an output level for each channel and a time delay in ms (indicated as an up arrow). Each track starts with a different leading channel such that the entire block fills the 8-channel space while rotating clockwise at a fixed rate.

DelV1

DelRamp1

Echo1