For TEXTURE, I spent a night walking around campus, making myself aware of the ambient sounds (that is, channeling my inner John Cage!). In that time, I also thought about the sonic concept of color/texture – its synesthetic nature, how it might be defined in or at least related to mathematical representations of sound. Texture relates strongly to the frequency spectrum of a given sound, but an “instantaneous” snapshot of a spectrogram is not enough to produce texture. Texture requires a time component, but even then the factor of time-scale introduces complications. In the same way that beats played at a fast enough rate become tones, texture at too small or large time scales becomes something else. Texture can also be relational, generating mood when simultaneous textures have some parallelism between them.

All sounds in TEXTURE were collected on campus except for one (a gas pump I recorded in my hometown, towards the beginning). I sought to have the listener join me on the walk I took while collecting sounds, alternating between largely natural and human-made environments. Natural sounds here are intended to point out the richness of sonic texture surrounding us in daily life. In the middle, the piece moves away completely from natural sounds to the man-made hum of a ventilator, which I pitch-shifted and harmonized with itself to represent the way that layered harmony begins to become a texture in its own right. Finally, the last part of the poem returns to the concrete and natural by stepping through an opening gate, but this time in the text it is the ear that does the walking – there is a harmony between the walker and his sense of hearing.