FrogPoolFarm

Listen to Frog Pool Farm (7:00)

One steamy moonlit night at the beginning of summer, I brought a portable DAT recorder over to a small pond in what was once prime Illinois farmland (and has since been turned into a suburban office park) hoping to capture one or two frog sounds. Unexpectedly, I stumbled into what can only be described as an insane frog orgy. There were so many frogs that I couldn’t walk without fear of stepping on one and they were singing so loudly that it was distorting in my ears and pegging the meter on my DAT. In all the noise, I had an uneasy sense that the mud was evolving into frogs and that each one of them was desperately straining upwards towards the full moon and singing as loud as he could, “Here I am!” — without regard for whether the noise would attract female frogs or predators. It was as if every living thing on earth was also struggling and reaching up towards the moonlight singing as loud as it could — “here I am!” — with the same desperate disregard for safety.

To make the piece, I started with the DAT recording and analyzed the impulse response of a single chirp. So what you will hear is a combination of sampled and purely synthetic frog chirps that become more and more warped. The original melody of the frogs was used to modify itself to produce a self-similar melody and the frog sounds sometimes morph to human-produced sounds to represent my hallucination of identity with the frogs. — CS

Uno stagno fumante al chiaro di luna in una prateria del midwest, acqua scura piena di vita; fango lungo la banchina che diviene rane, ognuna dell quali tende verso la luna piena. Il loro canto frenetico e disperato, incurante dei predatori e dell'entropia li risucchia verso il fango. Si scopre allora che non sono solo le rane a cantare, ma siamo tutti nois a farlo, tutti nois in questo stagno chiamato terra. —Program note from performance at Tevereterno Flussi Correnti Piazza Tevere 22 Giugno 2007