Frozen Day by Robert Rich

To create "Frozen Day" I began by recording the ambient sound in the garden behind our house, near the south end of San Francisco Bay. I recorded at least five minutes of sound at every hour, for an unbroken 24 hour cycle. The sound field consisted of near and distant traffic, overhead airplanes, birds squabbling over food, night insects, neighbors and the blurry hum of life: the natural events of our intrinsic soundscape. I organized the files chronologically from midnight to midnight, with a 50% overlap so that each five minute proxy of the hour fades in from the previous hour for 2.5 minutes, and fades out to the next hour for 2.5 minutes. The representative sound events from one day thus compress down to one hour. I routed this continuous audio crossfade to an algorithm that freezes the sonic spectrum of each moment, with a moving time window that allows new events to build up as old events fade out.

This process results in a magnification of the frequency spectra that characterize the sound energy in this particular location, during each moving window of time, throughout that particular 24 hour day. A gong-like timbre emerges from the elongation of each sonic event, slowly changing shape as the night transforms to day, air and ground traffic ebb and flow, birds and insects call to each other. Changes that took place over 24 hours are compressed into one hour, but momentary sounds are frozen in time rather than accelerated. Each event leaves trails that extend to a sonic horizon, building components that become the aural fingerprint of a place and time.

- Robert Rich, August 2013

Robert Rich has helped define ambient and electronic music, with over 50 albums across five decades. Rich began building his own analog modular synthesizers in 1976, when he was 13, and later studied computer music at Stanford's CCRMA while researching lucid dreaming. Rich performs and lectures worldwide. His all-night Sleep Concerts have become legendary.

robertrich.com