Dawn Planes

How It Was Made

In setting out to create Dawn Planes, my objective was to make a very pretty sound that would last for an hour or more without becoming stagnant and without arriving at any kind of climax or conclusion.

Dawn Planes is based on a theory:

Very slow movement around the circle of fifths will be perceived neither as stasis or progression but as a unique hybrid: something that is moving all the time but never seems to leave its home, never seems to traverse any perceptible distance.

a technological trick:

Using reverberation to sustain pitches, chords can be created by playing a sequence of single notes on a monophonic instrument. (Stuart Dempster's recordings of trombone played in very resonant spaces clearly pave the way for this aspect of Dawn Planes.)

and a sonic coincidence I discovered:

A trombone recorded on tape and played back at half its original speed sounds quite a lot like a faraway jet aircraft.

Musically, Dawn Planes progresses twice around the circle of fifths from A major to A major (once in each direction) using many major-6th and relative-minor-7th chords between keys. All the sound material was created by a single trombonist playing through a digital electronic reverb unit. Dawn Planes was recorded in August 1993 and the first mixdown was made the following month. A new (digital) mixdown was made about one year later.

Here's how the tape was prepared:

1. Custom reverb settings featuring a 75-second decay time were programmed into a Digitech digital effects generator.
2. I played my Holton F-trigger trombone in a somewhat resonant room and fed the output of a single microphone to the effects generator. The stereo output of the effects generator was recorded as a pair of tracks on a four-track cassette machine.
3. Beginning on a low A, I improvised, choosing pitches from the major chord and those closely related to it, gradually moving to new chords and leaving old ones. It took me about 20 minutes to go around the circle of fifths and return to A major. I ended on the low A I began with.
4. The four-track cassette was flipped over and the remaining two tracks were filled as a stereo pair in the opposite direction. The sequence of chords I created on this second pass was the retrograde of the sequence played during the initial pass and synchronized with playback of the first two tracks played (backwards) into headphones.
5. The resulting four tracks were played back in the initial, forward direction at half-speed, causing a drop in pitch of one octave, and they were mixed without further processing onto a digital tape. The master four-track tape was then flipped over and a second mixing was done of the two stereo pairs running in the retrograde direction. This too was recorded onto a digital tape.
6. These two 43-minute recordings comprise the two halves of Dawn Planes and are meant to fit on the front and back of a 90-minute cassette.

Because each side of the tape contains the sound of one forward trombone and one backward trombone, and because each begins with the same sounds the other ends with, Dawn Planes is essentially palindromic, and neither half can accurately be considered the "first" one. To avoid having to designate one side of the cassette as "Side One," I created a list of opposite direction or location indication pairs where neither element carried a connotation of primacy. One such pair is used to label each cassette, and I rotate through the list as the cassettes are made.

I call the piece "Dawn Planes" — "Planes" because the sound of the piece reminds me of distant passing aircraft, and also because of the immense flat expanse of the component chords; "Dawn" because these expanses remind me of the way the sun illuminates distant clouds in the moments before it rises.

How To Listen To It

I play my tape of Dawn Planes at almost exactly the same volume level every time I put it on. I experimented with many different settings, and found that the piece suffered tremendously when played too loud. It is my hope that the listener can reproduce in his or her home the same listening level that I achieve so that they will have the greatest opportunity to get out of the piece the same things that I do.

I considered for a long time the problem of creating an objective reference of absolute dynamic level without compromising the work's purity. The easiest solution would have been to begin the tape with either

1. A sound of common standard dynamic level, like conversational speech. The listener would be instructed to set their playback volume to a realistic level -- that is, just as loud as an actual person standing in their room speaking to them would be.
2. A sustained sound of relatively low VU level. The listener would be instructed to reduce their playback volume until the sound became inaudible.

I wanted not to put such a reference sound on the cassette because I mean for the listener to use an auto-reverse deck, when available, to create an endless supply of the Dawn Planes soundscape. Such a reference sound would be disrupting as it passed every 90 minutes.

Therefore, I have settled on a sort of compromise between the two options outlined above.

1. If you can hear the beginning of the first note on the "A" side of the cassette (however it is labeled), you are playing it back too loud. You should note that one side of the tape begins with a long tapering-on of sound and the other with a more clear attack of a single note. It is this latter side that I mean for you to consider as a volume reference.
2. By about five minutes into either side of the tape the volume level of the piece levels off. At this point, it should be just about as loud as aircraft passing overhead outside. If you can't hear it by this point, you are playing it too softly.
   
3. If possible, play the tape though speakers in a room other than the one you plan to occupy while the tape plays. You will need to raise the volume setting accordingly to achieve the appropriate levels described above.

Now, having devoted all this attention to setting the correct volume level, try to ignore the piece. It is meant to fill the silent corners of your room, to make it a little warmer, a little more languid. I personally use it frequently to help me drift off to sleep.

I have also played it outside on my backyard speakers and discovered that it seems to transform the sounds of actual passing aircraft into instruments that add their own pitch contributions as they accompany the tape.

Santa Barbara
October 1994