#ambientmusicworld - The Pink House

https://axonjournal.com.au/issues/5-2/pink-house

AFTERWORD: A MUSICAL TIME TRAVELLER 

There is a light just before sunset that I call the Suffolk pink. When John read me The pink house my senses felt that. I wandered around with the words inside my head for weeks looking for inspiration. It’s always out there. You just have to find it and the river is a good place for that—full of memories older than mankind with different ones washed up every day. 

I had taken a photo that haunted me with the patterns of the fields and the creeping Suffolk pink. I thought there had to be a way of capturing those colours in music. 

The river gave me an answer. 

Walking along one afternoon I heard what I thought was a cuckoo. The quickest way to capture the sound was by using my iPhone. This little vignette, with cows in a field and crows flying overhead, became the basis for the music of The pink house. 

I edited a few seconds of usable sound from the video and, using freeware called Audacity, started stretching the audio. There were seven stages, each time doubling the length until it got to just over four minutes. This stretching is like putting time in slow motion. The ambience of that moment, stretched from four seconds to four minutes, changes not only the sound but your perception of it. The crows took on a metallic silver sound whilst the cuckoo suggested a languid haunting melody. I added washes of ambience—presets titled ‘ambient currents’, ‘flowing winds’ and ‘sea shore’, chosen by the persuasion of their names. There was a pentatonic melody hidden there—a sound from the earth only heard when you slow time down.

And so I became a musical time traveller to a pink house in Suffolk. 

Jan Pulsford