[mp3 .zip archive / 17MB]

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What is it that makes us and everything else one and the same? There is a Zen question that goes like this: If everything returns to the one, what does the one return to? What is it?... What is it?...

'A single goose at the river shore utters its call under the thundering highway.'

All the sounds that appear in What is it? were produced by doing digital spectral transformations of field recordings gathered across the city of Toronto. They all belong to a series of meditative sound-walks I did starting at the Annex area and going southwest to where the Gardiner Express Way and the Don Valley River meet. From my view, the unprocessed sounds in this piece represent the "external" city reality while the emotional narrative of the piece (the structure of the piece itself and its sound transformations) represents the perceptions and reactions from a human condition (my own in this case), but at the end all of it being one and the same, emerging and subsiding, in constant flow in the timeless present moment. The piece tries to be a pointer to this reality of integration in an intuitive way.

The sound-walks were recorded using a semi-binaural technique were the microphones are placed on the head (in this case mounted on the sides of a baseball cap), right above each ear. This is different to the binaural technique, were the microphones are placed in-ear, and with the benefit of the semi-binaural being a good middle way between perfect speaker stereo imaging and perfect headphone localization. The sound transformations were done using a PC computer running 100% Open Source software : Linux (operating system), Csound (sound synthesis) and Ardour (multitrack audio editor)

This piece was produced during my participation in the composers residency organized by New Adventures in Sound Art, as part of their Sound Travels Festival, in the Summer of 2007. It was originally conceived and performed as a 12 channel piece but here it is presented in a stereo version (headphone listening is recommended to experience the semi-binaural characteristics of the soundscapes).