Sing Me The Ocean

Electroacoustics & Voice I. (0’) Intro/Underwater II. (1’54”) Song III. (4’) Foghorns IV. (11’) Finale The first idea for this work began while listening to my mother speak of growing up in Treyarnon Bay, a deserted beach in Cornwall, UK. She spoke of how there were only people around for a few months of summer, then the rest of the year the houses were empty. She remembered the long nights where she would hear the foghorn sounding from nearby Trevose Head. The foghorn would be used when there was poor visibility and the light from the lighthouse was not enough to keep boats safe. We searched for Trevose Foghorn and there it was, on a site named ‘Cornes de Brume’recorded by ‘Kupaia’ in 1993*. The sound was rich and mournful - she was transported back. I wondered how one would sleep through a whole night of that sound, two blasts of C#4 every 30 seconds. My mother said it was strangely comforting to hear as a child. There were many shipwrecks on that coast and it was still a real danger, the sound offered protection. I thought of ways to tell the story of the foghorn, to set it in its own world of sound. I imagined the dark cold ocean around, and how its sound would be the sound of hope if one was lost at sea. I thought of the rain, the wind, the crashing of waves. I thought about the different acoustics under the water’s surface - would there be silence? Noise? What kind of resonance? Would there be mermaids? The foghorn made me think of the mother’s heartbeat, heard by the baby in the womb, holding the thread of life through sound and repetition. I began recording underwater with a hydrophone, I recorded the clicking of crustaceans on the harbour, the creaking of the pier, the tap running in the bath, and made an outing with the help of my mother to record myself singing underwater in an ocean pool. I have joined these elements with the voice to make this work, which is part of my fourth year composition portfolio for the Bachelor of Music in Digital Music and Media. *Trevose Head Supertyphon by Vanessa Le Bris. Used with permission under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA), via ‘Cornes de Brume’. www.jessienewling.com