AUDITORIUM - SONET

The collage music project Auditorium's second album, "Sonet", is structured as a classic sonnet wreath translated into sound. Here, the listener is taken on a journey out into the grasshopper meadow.

Notes by Jbrandtp
During the Corona epidemic, I isolated myself in the countryside in Faxe Ladeplads (DK). Coincidentally, I had just bought a new small audio recorder (Roland R-07) ​​and a couple of small microphones (Soundman). When the jet planes were grounded during this period, there were suddenly good conditions for making field recordings, and I therefore took the opportunity to travel around the area (especially Feddet) and make recordings in nature. During this period, the equipment was expanded with a Røde NTG5 shotgun microphone, a pair of LOM Basic Ucho microphones and a Zoom F3 recorder, which is capable of recording with a 192 Khz sampling rate.

I have been busy recording grasshoppers for a number of years. Unfortunately, due to age, I had started to have difficulty hearing the leafhoppers. Therefore, I also acquired an ultrasound detector. This enabled me to discover new grasshopper species that I had not been able to hear before. The ultrasonic detector could also pick up bats. It turned out that I could even record pygmy bats screaming at a frequency of around 56 Khz with the above-mentioned audio equipment.

During the same period, I became aware of Inger Christensen's work "Sommerfugledalen", which is structured as a sonnet wreath. The sonnet, which originates from the Renaissance in Italy, is a poetic form with a very strict structure. A sonnet consists of 14 lines of verse with 7 rhyme pairs in the structure ABAB CDCD EFE GFG. The next sonnet begins with the last line of the previous sonnet. The last line of the 14th sonnet is identical to the first line of the first sonnet, thereby creating a cycle consisting of 14 sonnets, all of which "bite each other by the tail". This is called a sonnet wreath. From the first 14 lines of each sonnet in the sonnet circle, a Master Sonnet is formed, which must have the same ABAB CDCD EFE GFG structure as the underlying 14 sonnets.



Inspired by "Butterfly Valley", I decided to try to translate the poetic sonnet structure into a sound-based structure in Auditorium's sound collage form. Instead of rhyme pairs, I chose to work with sound categories. I started with the sound categories:
1. field recordings - ambience
2. field recordings - animal sounds
3. acoustic sound sources
4. acoustic instruments.

By processing these sound recordings in different ways, 4 more categories emerged:
5. ambience - bejegdlet
6. animal sounds - bejegdlet
7. sound sources - bejegdlet
8. instruments bejegdlet.

After experimenting a bit with these 8 categories, groups 1 and 4 were merged into one category, whereby I came down to 7 categories corresponding to the 7 rhyme pairs in the sonnet's 14 lines.

An audio-sonet was now mixed together from 14 audio recordings of one minute in length, so that the first sound starts at 0:00, the next sound starts at 0:30, and the next sound again at 1:00, etc. By fading each sound in and out, the sounds slowly slide into each other in a long, sliding motion. The last minute is then reused as the first minute of the next audio sonnet, in the same way that the last line of a sonnet is repeated as the first line of the next sonnet in the sonnet circle.