The Drone

This one does not come from the poem, it comes from the ear. Everything that sounds in this game, the carpet of air, the steps, the breath, the far off noises, sits from a thousand hertz upwards, and the band underneath was left empty: and that is the band where tension actually goes, because down there nothing is listened to and everything is felt. The drone puts two voices in it, a bed that is always on and a swell that arrives when the canto calls it, and neither has a position in the world: they are not in a room, they are underneath, and they stay out of every reverb tail. It starts in the dark wood and holds from there down.

The bed breathes with the wind and swells with fear, taking a second and four to come in and three and six to go out, because something that rises and falls quickly reads as a switch. It does not say where the beast is, for the same reason the heartbeat does not: it goes up with distance and nothing else. The swell never comes by itself: the canto calls it under something it has already written on the screen, the lantern picked up, the she wolf rising and coming down, the she wolf that will not stop any more, the boat detaching itself from the dark. It adds no information, it puts a body under one that was there already.

The note goes down as you go down. In the wood the bed sits at twenty seven hertz, in the antehell at twenty three, in the third circle at twenty two, inside the walls at twenty five and over the ditches at twenty, because the bigger and the more enclosed the place the more the rock takes the highs away, and a high note down there would sound like something standing close. It is written on its own and not taken from the generator the project already had, which mixes noise into what it calls a low note and does not really go down: here it is four partials and a slow breathing, without a thread of noise, with the frequencies forced to a whole number of turns inside the length, so the loop closes on itself and needs no fade. There was a third voice, a high tone that came in with fear, and it is gone: on paper it sat in an empty band, in practice it was unbearable to whoever played, and a free band is not a reason to occupy it.