2020

​

"Requiem for lost plants calls for reversing death. Artists Alice Yuan Zhang and Alexander Kaye digitally resurrect diminishing plant elders to share their stories for a global public through an immersive online environment, and for locals through site-specific augmented reality filters."

​

Requiem For Lost Plants: Notes/Refelections from Alexander Kaye: Unedited Transcription From Audio Recording: June 6th, 2024:

​

Text represented in brackets [example] was automatically generated by the transcription software, sometimes in error by mistakenly creating unsaid words, and other times in attempts to decipher background noise, sometimes accurately! 

​

"[BLANK_AUDIO]" represents moments of silence in my speech in my attempt to find the words or context within which I want to continue. 

​

"(fragment; restart)" represents a fragmented sentence and then starting that thought over from its beginning. 

​

START

​

"The sound artwork for Requiem for Lost Plants was a vast undertaking for me as an artist and composer because it involved so many different complex and ultimately subjective layers of context and thought that needed to be worked through in order to accurately represent the intention of the project's concept itself. Many different factors went into creating each sound for each... (fragment; restart) Many different factors went into creating the sound palette for each plant. Everything from specific plant characteristics like length of stem, length of leaves... to historical context, ecological context, to recording the physical sounds of the plants themselves as part of the score, and also my subjective human interpretations of [BLANK_AUDIO] sounds that I thought represented the plants given all of these different factors combined. [BLANK_AUDIO] All of these factors [BLANK_AUDIO] were ultimately input through various ways into both my modular synthesizer and Ableton software via LFOs, different variables of sound manipulation, the rhythmic patterns, and the frequencies themselves, which then created a sound painting unique to each plant. Several other factors were considered and implemented into these compositions - for instance an audio manipulation term called downsampling which digitally degrades the audio signal. I use this downsampling in some of the sounds to represent the plants continued degradation within the context of our anthropocentric society and all the implications that come along with that reality. Some of the sounds are very rough and aggressive due to this downsampling of the audio signal. I would like the listener to take all of these thoughts into consideration while listening along with their own interpretations of what the sounds mean for each plant and what that means to them and their relations with these plants and their environment in general. 

​

Another large factor for me to think about in this project was not only the plant's individual sound characteristics, but potentially most importantly, how these plants within this soundscape are actually communicating with each other and interacting with each other, and how to represent that with sound. There has been a plethora of research over the last few decades about plant's transmissions and communications to each other, many of which go through different mycelial networks. And I wanted to try and attempt to represent that communication with sound in this project. I did that in a few ways. One way was to have the plants sort of call out to each other with their sounds, and then having those sounds change and manipulate the sounds of other plants, almost like a call and response action. Another way I did this was to consider each plant's nutrient-importance in its ecological environment and within relation to each other plant. For instance, the willow tree being a very large organism providing and requiring a lot of nutrients... that sound palette of the willow tree is very large and very intense. This was done intentionally to represent the importance that this large organism has in its environment. [birds chirping]

I also created a series of field recordings around the Los Angeles area specific to this project's concept. One recording was made at a large trainyard in Los Angeles. One recording was made on the ocean. One recording was made on the 110 freeway. One recording was made on the Los Angeles River. And a final field recording was made of a bicycle clicking, which is represented mostly in the 3D virtual world that my collaborator Alice Yuan Zhang created. 
 

​

​