Spider Studies
How might a being that experiences a radically different sensory reality perceive an iconic human artifact?
Spider Studies collects a number of musical sketches creating during the scoring of the short film A Spider Experiences The Dark Side Of The Moon, a collaboration with Jenny Kendler.
Each piece originated as a short sample of a track from Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon. In attempts to translate the tactile and auditory experience of the spider as a listener, the original samples were heavily processed by various digital effect banks. The resulting material was then arranged into the seven compositions presented here.
Research shows that jumping spiders seem to perceive frequencies in the range of 40Hz to 600Hz. They exhibit particular sensitivity to sounds which occur between 80Hz and 130Hz - matching the sonic profile of wasps, their chief predators. These facts along with musings about the manner in which spiders experience time (At what rate? In a linear fashion? As discrete, granular quanta?) became the conceptual basis for the physical transformation of the original music.