Saturday, May 20, 2006

water music

In honor of the balmy weather, I reinstated my long-neglected habit of taking a brisk lunchtime walk around Jamaica Pond today. The pond is still roughly half-frozen, but in most places, the ice has already melted in the two-foot shallow band along the shoreline. As I was walking along, I kept hearing a lovely, shimmery, unearthly sound. On further inspection, this turned out to be the result of an odd melting pattern along the pond's edge; instead of uniformly transforming into water, the ice had melted into hundreds of tiny shards that were floating together in a miniature arctic ice flow. As the wind blew across the surface of the pond, the resultant waves jostled the ice shards together, creating a delicate silvery music of a sort you'd expect to hear being broadcast from Neptune.

It made me wish I had a little recorder with me to capture the sound. The ubiquitousness of digital cameras has made casual photography a plausible method of recording the visually beautiful moments in one's daily life, but there's really no good technological equivalent for preserving the auditory ones. Piggybacking on the appeal of photoblogs these days, I'm keen to attempt a soundblog - a place to showcase all the beautiful and unexpected little noises of everyday experience. I'd need the right tools for the job though, and -there- I'm at a loss.

Ideas, anyone?

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