Creating Unique Site-Specific Works
Music for 33 Drain Pipes is a sound art installation featuring hydrophone recordings at points along the South Fork of the American River, Cosumnes River headwaters, adjacent ponds, meadows, creeks, and reservoirs in the watersheds of El Dorado County, CA. The piece is created by composer and musician, Paul Godwin, with additional music by Miguel Noya, and photography and writing by Ameera Godwin.
By setting audio speakers in freestanding drainage pipes, visitors walk through a reconfigurable soundscape to experience different parts of the river system. The aim is to give listeners a sense of the microscopic lifeforms, chemical oxidation and sometimes surprising emissions of life captured in the recordings.
The piece premiered as a sound art walk made up of seven listening stations installed along the lake at American River Conservancy's historic Wakamatsu Farm, Placerville, CA at the RIPE AREA Arts + Nature Festival on June 2, 2024.
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This work is just one example of the installations we create. Do you have a project or environmental site in mind that might be suitable for an art, sound, and music installation or performance?
Please reach us to discuss your interests in our site-specific works that offer unique, direct experiences with the environment and community.
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Underwater Field Recording
"New to underwater recording, I was puzzled by the wealth of burbling and popping coming from the shallows. Was the “boiling” sound a mistake of the technology? Did the clicks come from little creatures? I learned I was mostly hearing plants responding to light. The soundscapes were actually emergent fields of interspecies communication. Mapping the sounds to instruments yielded surprising compositions, which are then further randomized by playing back the recorded loops asynchronously as people walk by.
In our workshop Miguel and I invited participants to explore Nature Journaling through field recording at Wakamatsu Pond. Listening to and interacting with invisible underwater sound-makers felt for us like a devotional dance with nature."
—Paul Godwin, Musical Director, Myrtle Tree Arts
Miguel Noya Creates Biophony: The Lake is Singing
"I have been listening to the sounds of nature for so many years and have found that composing music can break the randomness we perceive at first, to realize that sounds happening at a single moment in different seasons are original pieces in a continuous infinite music piece.
In this piece to be installed in a woody glade near Wakamatsu Pond, I include sounds of a frog community recorded in the riparia of my Venezuelan family farm, as a metaphorical experiment in species migration, perhaps due to forces connected to globalization, or to climate crises we are facing. In earlier experiments I exposed frogs to their own sounds or singing from the past, from a month to years, and found out that they react to their own species sounds even coming from artificial means of playback. I will extend this concept to other beings like insects, plants and certainly to the geological elements too, like water sounds. In this case, bringing in the sounds from South America will give an extra layer to the original local voices with family members from a distant part of the planet, like introducing a family from abroad.
—Miguel Noya
Venezuelan musical pioneer, Miguel Noya has over 15 albums to his name and continues to collaborate and release ground-breaking, gorgeous electronic music worldwide. His concerts across Europe, South America and the US are always unique with his design for surround-sound psycho-acoustic environments
Secret sounds of Ponds
RIPE AREA guest educator and performer, David Rothenberg is a leader in the exploration of natural sounds and music. He shared his wisdom and experiences in the RIPE AREA workshop, “Secret Sounds of Wakamatsu Pond.”
A musician and philosopher, David Rothenberg wrote Why Birds Sing, Bug Music, Survival of the Beautiful and many other books, published in at least eleven languages. He has more than forty published recordings. In 2024, he won a Grammy Award for his work, For the Birds, in the category of Best Boxed Set. Whale Music and Secret Sounds of Ponds are his latest books.