Sonic Artifice

Brightness, shade, temperature, and other atmospheric conditions have their equivalents in sound.

Surfaces dappled with sunlight suggest different tones than those in bright light or deep shadow. Textures and colors bring to the mind and inner ear diverse auditory images, as do gestures and movements.  

Instrumentation and composition cannot replicate these perceptions with exactitude, but may imply the sounds of their reality.

Resurgam

Originality is an imposition of will athwart the mundane.

The artist is the individual who will not be subsumed into mediocrity and mere chaos.

Every stroke of pen or brush, every release of note and tone, sound and pattern, is an existential act.

Sounds of Future History

Listen forward.

Predictive analysis always suggests combinations of the real and the potential, out of the deepest possible past and through the broadest present awareness.

Listener and composer lift wind through reeds to the Anemoi, and upward to the spaces between the stars.

The Angel Passing Through

In the sudden silences, the inner ear acclimates to surroundings.

For listener and composer, this is simply the continuum of aural imagery and the moment now.

Aural and Sensory Clarity

In large measure, external motivation fuels attention, narrowing perception and focus to objects of immediate desire.

This concentration on the appetites, essentially limitless in nature, diminishes awareness, being, and meaning. A deficit of moral reason will not be replaced by the transient and temporal, nor will these supplant vision.

Begin by taking notice of the surroundings, giving consideration to those elements of the outer and inner worlds that are disregarded; as directly as possible, perceive without subjective distraction, and contemplate experience and atmosphere with the mind's eye and the inner ear.  See, hear, and listen in such ways as heighten awareness and consciousness across the sensory spectrum, refining and bringing lucidity to feeling and thought.

The way of the artist demands intention, force, and balance.

Shaping, Restraining, Releasing

Sound and vision cohere in art through systematic approaches.  Even so, spontaneity, improvisation, and experimentation are critical elements to original concepts.

The nature of atmospheric sound composition includes selective input, shading and juxtaposition of tones, and flexibility in ordering processes and arrangements; the extemporaneous and unexpected bring vivacity to these methods and applications.

Ultima Thule

The sounds of urban environments tend toward the metallic, electronic, strident, pale, and brightly reflective.  Street, shop window, old brick and new concrete, restaurant, business, hiss of elevators, radio night air traffic.

Suburbs bring voices, automobile society, games, radio and television, air conditioning thrum, floor plan, patio, murmuring landscapes constructed for pleasure and altered by weather conditions.

Rural sounds flow with wind, wood, water, and wildlife.  But there is asphalt, railroad, shopping center, institution, home and garden.  And, like the cities and their environs, the sounds of cultural order and disorder-- intellectual and emotional, physical and spiritual, social and personal.

But even yet there are sounds at a distance to all human contact, beyond society, media, and culture --unimagined geographies, uncanny and otherworldly.  The real challenge is to perceive, discover and bring these atmospheres into being.