Disquiet Junto Project 0408: Fritiniency Tronics
The Assignment: Were “fritiniency” (“the chirruping sound made by birds or insects”) a musical genre or technique, what would it sound like?
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I've been pretty fascinated by using insect sounds, ever since reading an article about The Insect Apocalypse late last year. Since then, there's been a proliferation of articles about declining insect numbers and what that means for the rest of us - and I've been mediating on this theme over multiple tracks. Here is the last of the series - how it might sound like when many insects become a distant, fading memory.

The original track was a 13sec recording of crickets in my front yard. I slowed the track down about 1600%,then ran some frequency filters to hone in on specific frequency bands. I found this process via Joanna Bailie, an English composer whose works explore the hidden rhythms and musicalities in a sound through elongating a moment. For me, this process has turned an insect into a wonderous, mournful, textured instrument.

Layer 1: Crickets, slowed 1600% with Paris resonator + chamber trio delay + Moving 3-5-6 delay
Layer 2: Crickets, slowed 1600%, filtered at 500-1khz with Paris resonator + Moving 3-5-6 delay
Layer 3: Crickets, slowed 1600%, filtered at 2khz with Paris resonator + Ring frequency shifter + Replika triplet delay
Layer 4: Original recording of crickets with reverb