Womb Oscillations by Brian Grainger

Womb Oscillations is a five-volume set of recordings, both unprocessed and processed, that document and abstractly represent the growth of my daughter before her birth on April 10th, 2012. As many people who know me personally can attest to - I am obsessively carrying an audio recorder almost everywhere I go, and will never pass on any opportunity to record things that I find fascinating, personal or important. As such, my wife's months of pregnancy gave me a chance to record things I'd never have a chance to again - the sound of my unborn daughter's heartbeat. I purchased a fetal doppler device in February 2012 and proceeded to have nightly "sessions" where we would isolate her heart-throbs and record them until she moved out of range. Once I'd collected about an hour of this audio, I went to work carefully processing it in different ways. What did a prenatal human heart sound like if I used it as the source sound to create a sustained tonal drone piece? I had to know. In addition to this recording and experimenting, I also began to do discreet room recordings during my wife's increasingly frequent ultrasounds. These field recordings were mostly meant as a set of personal memoirs from that time, although once again I could not resist the urge to process them in artful ways. So what I've ended up with is a massive work of deep and engaging experimental audio - split into five detailed volumes:

Phase One: Naked Genesis [Unaltered Documents Of Prenatal Growth] (61:55)
Phase Two: S1 [Feedback Sculpture Triptych] (73:50)
Phase Three: S2 [Feedback Extension For Low-Decibel Playback] (59:00)
Phase Four: Evaporants In Mono [Archive I] (56:59)
Phase Five: Evaporants In Mono [Archive II] (39:05)

Phase One contains the original and unedited recordings of my daughter's heartbeat in utero via a fetal doppler device and binaural microphone. Phase Two contains three "feedback sculptures" - drone pieces built using the audio from Phase One as the sole input source, alongside a complex system of exponential reverb processing. Phase Three contains an hour-long suite of a very minimal sculpture, specially mastered at a lower volume level for more atmospheric playback. Phase Four and Phase Five are the results of processing the ultrasound room recordings with analog reverb and selective equalization and compression - essentially reducing human speech and the acoustic sounds of physical movement to abstracted trails of tone and texture.

This set has been kept away until the perfect release date - December 16th, 2012 - my 8th wedding anniversary and our first with our daughter. Considering the size and length of this project, only sixteen copies of the release are being produced physically.

Tracklist

1.	February 13th [Mother]	0:50

2.	February 13th [Father]	0:24

3.	February 13th [Daughter]	12:12

4.	February 21st	11:04

5.	February 22nd	13:44

6.	February 25th	10:21

7.	February 25th [Feedback]	2:25

8.	February 27th	10:56

9.	Shape One	11:04

10.	Shape Two	19:20

11.	Shape Three	43:27

12.	Shape Four [Intrasound Trails In A Thin Straight Line]	59:00

13.	January 1st [A]	11:55

14.	January 1st [B]	6:45

15.	February 9th	5:11

16.	February 10th [D / D / D]	33:08

17.	February 23rd	6:54

18.	March 1st	4:25

19.	March 8th	9:32

20.	March 15th	2:28

21.	March 22nd	8:51

22.	March 29th	3:21

23.	April 3rd [Precursor]	1:47

24.	April 17th [Introduction]	1:47

Credits

released December 16, 2012

Produced, recorded, processed and mastered by Brian Grainger at Botany Bay, 2012. This is Milieu Music number MML089.

License