Glad I heard your stuff on BBC 3 New Music show. Will now regularly listen to you. You make such good art!

Travelling to different places introduces us to new exotic soundscapes often dominated by pulsing rhythmic and static musical patterns. Frogland explores night-time field recordings from Florida and Brisbane which are dominated by crickets and frogs. A variety of sound design tools have been used to create this work such as spectral analysis and transformation and granular processing. 
I would like to thank composer Rick Nance for allowing me to use some of his Frog recordings for this piece. 
I was also inspired by Francis Dhomont’s fantastic work Signé Dionysos 1983-91 while writing this piece and I had a wonderful conversation with him about this work at the KLANG! Festival, June 2019 in Montpellier.

Commissioned by the University of Greenwich in partnership with L-ISA Immersive Sound Art to create a new work for their Ocean Surround Sound system in Highgate, London. 
This project was funded by the Higher Education Innovation Fund and I had the opportunity to works alongside project director Dr. Andrew Knight-Hill (University of Greenwich) and Paula Fairfield (Sound Designer for Game of Thrones). I would also like to thank Dr. Andrew Hill for organising this project.
Frogland is also an exploration of ambisonic workflow and working in Higher Order Ambisonics. Composed at EMS studios, Stockholm in September 2019.

Frogland

Revisiting some under-explored experiments in "self-directed" sonic systems from Design After Nature project in 2008.  An experiment in maximal minimal generative systems (most variety, from simplest system).

What if sound determined the conditions of it's unfolding? 

In this example a tap dripping controls its own playback.

Pseudocode: 

Play sample
Listen for onsets
If above threshold (probabilistically) 
- change direction and speed (as an inverse function of the frequency of strongest partial -- to create a simple homeostasis) 
- resynthesise N partials according to the original energy distribution at the point of onset detection.

This simple routine draws out and explores the latent rhythmic and spectral content of everyday sounds. Endlessly. 

Best listened late at night on headphones.

It has a of life of it's own that I find quite pleasing. But I have been living on my own for nearly 3 months now : ) 

Implemented in the excellent beads for processing by Ollie Bown
http://www.beadsproject.net/

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Frogland

Brona Martin

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