I'm spending a lot of time in the studio with my ear buds listening to Ryan Ingebritsen's Whitewater Songpath Project. There are many reasons this project is so incredibly engaging to me. Yes, it is the beautiful sound of nature with its silences, water, bird chirps, and all you would expect from a recording of a hike through nature. But more deeply, it is the experience of being inside a composer's head and the chance to experience the audio landscape as he experiences it.
Exploring marks, texture, and combinations of materials is what drives my visual work. It happens to be adding up to landscape imagery right now, but it is the love of each part that makes the whole that thrills me as I work. As Ryan composed his Songpath piece he did so by physically moving through a space and listening to the texture, combinations of sounds, acoustics, and I can't begin to guess as to what other many other subtleties. When speaking with Ryan, I was delighted to find he was thinking of his piece as more of an abstraction of sounds that happen to add up to a landscape, but it's not a portrait of a landscape. He was moving through a space with particular sound properties which he used to compose a piece- by moving physically through the space he composed a symphony. His symphony just happens to have an instrumentation that is an entire ecosystem.
detail.
detail.
The following drawings are done to specific portions of the Songpath recording spanning from 4 to 10 minutes in duration. These represent the first 20 minutes of the piece so far and are in order.
Here is Ryan talking about his Song Path project. Enjoy!
