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Seaside Cove Soundwalk

by Chad Crouch

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Seaside Cove Soundwalk 32:10
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This is the last installment in our Pacific Ocean summer series. Seaside Cove.

Listening back to this Soundwalk last night I was reminded of a couple objects from my childhood. Both of them lived in our Living Room. The first thing is the Conch shell. My mom had a thing for shells and. Our living room was decorated with them. There was a basket of shells, for many years the Christmas tree in this room was decorated in a shell theme, with starfish hanging from the boughs, naturalist seashell prints on the walls, was there a seashell upholstery at one time. Anyway, Bach to the Conch. It was a big one. Maybe almost a foot long. It seemed really big to my childhood body. My sister told me that if you listened to it, you could hear the beach. I thought this was fascinating. Of course, holding it carefully up to my ear, you could hear something. Not waves really, but a pressure, a "whoo" sound. I thought this was fascinating, and magical. Like the tooth fairy or Santa Claus. Like the shell was some kind of long, invisible tin-can-and-string telephone to the beach.

The other thing that lived in our Family Room was the family piano. I took lessons in the fourth grade for a few months, but was rarely motivated to practice the tunes from the lesson book. I skipped ahead to teach myself “Oh My Darling Clementine”, but that turned out to be the high point of my piano education. I stopped going to lessons after a few months. Later in high school I would sit down and just explore the keys in the quiet house, mapping out by ear which keys sounded good together, discovering some utility in the black keys, discovering octaves and playing the same notes with my right and left hands, finding a tone in the movement of my fingers that expressed me. Finding my way slowly. Today my playing is still naive.

In many ways I’m still just that kid, when I listen to this Soundwalk. I’m still untrained on the keyboard and I still find the sounds of the beach to be alluring and even a little bit magical. This soundwalk features quite a bit of beach din—it’s very Oregon Coast beach sound. You can almost hear the air pressure, like the resonance of the conch. The pitch of the surf rising as I walk toward it. The vibrato effect created by walking through the soup of air, step by step.

Like other beach soundwalks, I employed a close-up stereo array, dangled above the tongues of waves that would lap around the stones where the beach met the headland. These sounds to me are the carmel, so to speak, in the chocolate bar of the soundwalk. A sweet rush of high frequencies rinsing the synapses.

So this seems like a good closer for the series. I'm pleased to share it with you.

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released August 25, 2023

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Chad Crouch Portland, Oregon

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