We’re off to the shores of Lake Michigan, for a field recording of waves submitted and transformed for our World Listening Day project by artist Eric Leonardson, who explains his process here:

“In support of the World Listening Day 2015 H2O Cities and Memory call for recordings, I submitted a field recording a reimagined water sound.”

“Early one summer morning, for the former I recorded the actual waves of Lake Michigan washing ashore on the beach where I live.”

“Steel breakwaters embedded deep into the sand provide an additional surface to place the microphone close to the water, where it washes against the breakwater and the beach.”

“For my reimagined water sound I used convolution, a type of digital re-synthesis of two recordings.”

“A recording of my voice repeating a simple phrase, “so on and so forth,” was the source and the field recording from the waves rolling into the beach here was the ‘impulse.'”

“My thanks again go to Tom Erbe for creating the venerable SoundHack freeware application I used for the convolution.”

“The principle behind this digital process is one of extracting and applying the timbral characteristics of a chosen audio file, as the “impulse,” to transform another audio file, the “source” for it to reverberate according the behavior of the impulse.”

‘This explanation of convolution probably makes no sense. But, nonsense is fairly consistent with the unpredictable results convolution has when using a timbrally complex sound as the impulse.”

City version:

Memory version: