The plan:
A natural soundscape is already a rich listening experience.
Step 2 is simply a remix.
Weird fan art.
I recorded thumping 12 mushrooms in Pisgah National Forest. I used a shotgun mic and a Lom Geofon stuck in the ground nearby.
I made a plugin so you can play all 12 mushrooms with a MIDI controller. Here's a fun track I made using Mushroom Thumper for all the percussion.
I found a smooth lake rock in Ironwood, MI that was perfectly split in half. The halves were smooth on top and I instinctively picked them up and rubbed them together. Like sandpaper blocks (or a mineral-rich güiro if we're feeling generous), the inspiration struck and I improvised a performance while looking out on Lake Superior. Later I composed this short piece to the recording thinking about shipwrecks.
Journeying through the dunes, excited to reach the water on my first time visiting Sleeping Bear Dunes, I was stopped by a lovely leaf rustling of an eastern cottonwood. Such a soft sound was only able to reach my beach-going attention in such a low-noise ambience.
After experiencing this sound, my mind curiously wandered to caution when using "pure" sine waves in composition/production due to the absence of overtones making it hard to mix. I was curious to hear a sample of this soft leaf rustling layered with a sine wave. The sample is transposed with the same MIDI, alluding to the melody. Maybe this is enough for the melodic intent to survive even if the sine is lost, while preserving a pure tonality that makes sines so delightful.
I also tried using envelope following on the leaf rustling audio to frequency modulate the sine wave. It has the effect of dirtying the sound but with the purity of the sine still in sight. Call it placebo, but I think it's quite organic.
I arrived at the conclusion that both of these techniques are cool, so I employed both while composing a short loop that captured the feeling of being captivated by a peaceful sound whispering to the dunes and the occasional passerby.
Looping back from the sky bridge arch at red river gorge, you traverse the base of a sandstone escarpment. When I was there, water was dripping in what I wanted to be a polyrhythm.
Like a slant rhyme, I charged forward wishing it to be so. A wonky beat emphatically proclaims the drips to be a musical pulse, though the math doesn't check out. It doesn't need to in order to have a good time.
Recording directly facing open wind is a great way to "hear" the limiter on the Zoom H6...
It's fun to use noisy recordings in place of white noise for percussion synthesis. This is the same audio, processed through a ratcheting amplitude envelope.
A strength of contact mics is that they aren't susceptible to wind. I taped one to a beach marker that was swaying in the wind. I didn't consider how my cables were bumping into the marker, but thought it was actually an interesting way to "play" the marker with some physicality introduced by the environment.
Tiring of the wind exposure, I escaped to the thin forest on the island and managed to record a lovely bird call.
I put the bird call into a sampler and created a beat using the elements above. I really enjoyed using samples that have their own melodic motion. Sustaining a note lets the bird sing its true song.
My family visited Manatee Springs State Park and had a delightful manatee encounter.
I drifted out in a kayak into the forest between the spring and the Suwannee River and enjoyed the soundscape. I put an XY on the nose of my vessel and recorded for a while, only occasionally paddling to avoid bumping into trees. Later I wrote a piece of music from an excerpt of that recording, putting it through many resonators (Corpus in Ableton Live) and then adding some cinematic elements.
I like to think that nature produces the most majestic music all on its own and that we as human creators just need to expand our ears (and slow our minds) to appreciate it. In that sense this exercise was somewhat sacrilegious. However, most of us are not in a meditative state or free to go to quiet places often. Bearing that in mind, this was a nice way to infuse the texture and pacing of a soundscape into a form that can translate to the busy world.