July 7, 2001

The Cicada “symphony” - environmental recordings.

(Acquiring some of the sounds for the “Zqyrax” project.)

The journey:

The time of the year is July here in Mesa, Arizona and the monsoon season is just trying to begin.  The cicadas have been out in force and singing almost every afternoon. I was heading up Highway 89, North-northeast toward Payson, just above the Fort MacDowell Indian Reservation. I decided to leave the highway and travel west on a dirt road, in search of some cicada songs. The cicadas had been singing quite a bit on some afternoons in days past, but for some reason they weren’t today. They were present everywhere and their occasional clicks could be heard, but they just weren’t buzzing. I wandered around for a better part of the late afternoon and, as the sun began to get close to setting, I still hadn’t found any buzzing. So I finally gave up and began to head back home. As I drove back toward Mesa, I began to imagine that I heard cicada buzzing.  The sun was just on the edge of the horizon and at first I dismissed it as just wishful thinking. Perhaps my ears were playing tricks on themselves now. It could just be the frequencies of the wind, the van, the other cars rushing down the highway.  At a stoplight, on the Fort MacDowell Indian reservation, I rolled my window down and found that my ears had not been deceiving me. The cicadas had simply waited today until sunset before they had decided to sing in full force.

The setting:

I positioned myself about a half-mile off the highway, a mile or two southwest of the Salt River Garbage Dump. This desert site, on the Salt River Indian reservation, is a very active one for sound. In addition to the buzzing cicadas, the early-evening traffic can be heard whispering from the highway behind me. My van, which I’d parked only about 20 – 25 feet away, can be heard clicking and settling occasionally. Jets, on the approach to Sky Harbor International Airport, can be heard overhead as they prepare to land. I was able to find one particularly loud cicada and positioned myself only about 5 feet away from it. I was close enough to even see as it occasionally shifted and flitted to a different branch of the creosote bush on which it was buzzing. I decided that this would be my “soloist” in this emerging symphony of sound.