Adventures In Sound

Near my home, down some sedate residential side streets populated by the upper half of the financially polarized town, is a small park known - by popular usage only, I suspect - as the Arb. The plot is comprised of a large egg-shaped reservoir, along with several smaller satellite bodies of the same shape. A path - perhaps intended as such, though probably only delineated by continuous use - coils tightly around the perimeter of the main egg.

It's a nice place to go at night to talk, sit for a while, and wrap one's self in the stars. Generally free of any social ties, it's a spot I can go to with just about any one of my friends. When the weather's fine, as it has been lately, it's not uncommon to end up there nearly every night.

In May, my friend Jace returned from an eight-month sojourn in Seattle, where she attempted to return herself to a state of constant wonder. She found the WTO and we had a lot to catch up on. It was clear and warm and we ended up under the moon at the Arb by default.

As we approached, we heard irregular groans; like trucks moaning on a distant highway. Getting closer, we realized the sound was local. By the time we got to the water's edge, the sound was all around us -- an unearthly symphony of noise, entire rows and sections of throat singers, creaking doors, and old houses settling. I didn't know what to make of it, precisely.

"Frogs," Jace said quietly.

We followed the path as it wound into a narrow strip between the main reservoir and a smaller one. Huge sounds continued to emerge around us. We stopped. When we were occasionally able to pick out individual amphibians, the volume was absolutely impossible. I couldn't conceive how something so small could make a noise so tremendous. It was as if each frog's gullet contained a portal to an infinitely stretching chamber.

The frogs made two basic sounds. The first, a deep nearly meditative drone, rose and fell with gradual intakes and slow exhalations. The second was a cartoonish snap, a rubber band stretched and plucked, as if someone wanted to make an aural representation of a frog's hop. Spread out around the water, the din panned gloriously, existing in the dimension beyond quadraphonic sound, as the frogs mirrored each other.

There was a definite structure somewhere in the chaos. Though it wasn't always the same, one frog emerged out of the murky silence with one cycle of the low rumble. After a pause, another nearby frog picked up on it and himself ran through it. After another pause, they were joined by countless others.

Synching up, they rode the hypnotically cresting waves for up to a minute straight. During this moment, the sound was ineffably beautiful. Throughout, the other frogs would contribute entropical noises of their own, lending an air of chaotic static to the events. It was out of this that frogs began to make the second kind of noise, shooting back and forth across the pool like skipping stones. Gradually, the chaos overtook the pattern and everything died to silence... at least for a few moments.

"I wonder what they're talking about," Jace pondered. "I bet they're having a conference about what to do about the dandelions." She pronounced it "dan-dee-lions". The yellow flowers had taken over a small hillside by the entrance to the Arb. Earlier, we had proclaimed it the Year of the Dandelion. We wondered why if each dandelion yielded at least 40 seedlings, and only two of those caught (which would seem logical), why didn't the number of dandelions double each year? We decided that the frogs knew the answer to such a problem.

Over the next three nights, I went back with different people, each of whom reacted very differently. First, I brought my father - a hippie mystic in his own right - who was visiting from out of state. Dad didn't think the noise had any content in the sense that we were familiar with. What the frogs were "saying" might well have meaning, he suggested, just not on any level - higher or lower - isomorphic to our own ideas. Their communication is a seamless part of their environment and might only "mean" as a function of that.

The next night, I was accompanied by my friend Harold, a bio major. "This is really cool!" he exclaimed. "We were just talking about this in class."

"Oh, yeah?" I paraphrased what Dad had said the previous evening.

"Well... no one's quite sure," Harold admitted. "But it's strictly biological. They're not really saying anything -- it's just reproduction cycles and shit; mating calls."

Might it transcend that?

"I dunno," he shrugged and proceeded to reel off a stream of percentages and probabilities.

After I told my housemate Garon about it, he got extremely excited. "I'll bring my DAT and mics out there. I can record it."

At first, I shared in his enthusiasm. "Yeah, yeah, let's do it tonight!"

As the day wore on, though, and I thought about it more, the less I wanted to record. It didn't seem right. the beauty of the frogs' music wasn't entirely in the sound itself. A large part of it had to do with the fact that it could only be heard under very precise conditions: a warm evening in the late spring or early summer at the Arb.

It could only be heard in its natural environment. Digitizing it, I thought, would take it out of that, cheapen it. One could listen to the frogs as pure sound. By doing so one could easily - and would almost be forced to - completely disassociate the sound from its origins. Part of its magic lay in where one was.

Unlike a concert hall, the sound did not transcend the venue. Instead, the venue (sound and all) managed to transcend the rest of the world. Recording it would net it in, pull it back towards terra firma.

I told Garon about all of this. "Don't worry," he replied. "The mics won't get in your way." He couldn't be dissuaded.

That afternoon, a brief thunderstorm rolled in. It poured for an hour or so, and moved on. By nightfall, the temperature had plummeted down into the low 50s. I went somewhat reluctantly to the Arb. As we approached, we heard nothing. Getting closer, I realized that most of the frogs had gone away after the storm. There were a few volume swells perpetrated by lonely frogs, but no one picked up on them. No one at all.

Jesse Jarnow is a founding member of the Studio 77 Art Collective, which doesn't really exist.