I started working on “Cycles” in summer 2023 in Big Basin Redwood State Park, as part of a group of artists tasked with creating art in response to the park’s recovery from a recent wildfire. Although I was in the woods, without a computer, electricity, or cell service, I couldn’t help thinking about how well the procedural music systems I’d been working on mapped to the forest’s natural processes.

Procedural music (or algorithmic, or generative) just means that you design a system/set of rules that produces music—it often includes some environmental chance that makes the music a little different every time you run the system. In Big Basin, I was struck by how different the forest looked—no deep reddish browns, no dark greens, all black char and bright neon green sprouts—but also how it must have looked quite similar to the time just after the previous fire burned through the area, some decades ago. It’s part of its own (much more complex!) repeating system, which felt like a wonderful model for a piece.

This art initiative, the Big Basin ArtAbout, was an amazing experience, and I’m grateful to everyone from CA State Parks who did a ton of work making it happen—Scott, Garret, Armando, Sky, Estrella, Erin, Rhiannon, Alex, Will, Martin, Marika—plus the Mountain Parks Foundation who generously contributed funding. The artist group was a fascinating bunch, that produced many beautiful pieces. Lastly, I owe a shout out to Aaron and the Unreal Engine audio team, who clearly thought “why couldn’t you make art in a game engine,” and created an inspiring set of tools to facilitate just that. I couldn't have built this piece in anything else.

“Cycles” is a procedural music composition about appreciating a forest through all parts of its life cycle.

The piece continually generates new compositions, one after another—each iteration of the piece derives from the same source material and compositional rules, but the generation incorporates enough environmental chance that no two renderings are the same (and some are in fact very different). Surprisingly, this algorithmic, “digital” feature represents the natural world quite closely. A forest that grows back after a fire is created from many of the same common inputs (species, weather, sun exposure, etc.) as the forest that came before it; however, it won’t grow back in exactly the same way. Recognizing these two aspects—the uniqueness of the moment in time, and the relationship to the same moment in other cycles—was helpful to me in appreciating fire as a natural part of a forest.

I’ve lived in California for about a decade, and it was not until relatively recently that fire touched places I’d spent a lot of time in. I found this challenging and overwhelming, and it was hard to see these places after a fire and think anything positive had come from it. I wanted to take this opportunity to compose something that viewed the cycle in totality, situating fire as a transitional element rather than an ending.

The sonic material in “Cycles” is primarily made up of wooden sounds—mostly harmonic and inharmonic percussion instruments—which represent the natural environment, and synthesized sounds, which represent human influence. You may also hear field recordings captured in the early morning on a 2023 trip to Big Basin Redwood State Park.

The form of each iteration of the composition comprises four sections (phases). The musical content of these phases mimic the phases of a forest life cycle: the first phase rapidly spawns new elements, which either die out or settle into repeating polyrhythms; the second adds more melodic content and harmonic development; the third phase evolves the repeating rhythmic material of phase one and two into a living, widely varied soundscape; and the fourth, final phase is a chaotic deconstruction of sound recorded from phase three.

There are three primary visual modes in “Cycles,” also procedural in nature. The first mode displays 3D photogrammetry scans taken in Big Basin of redwood trees that survived the 2020 CZU Lightning Complex fire; the second mode displays a top-down view of a topographic map of the Big Basin area. In both of these modes, the camera focuses in on new areas every time, and a light set up to mimic the sun at Big Basin traverses from sunrise to sunset over the duration of each cycle. The third mode features both photography taken at Big Basin, and one of four particle simulations that react to the generated audio in real time. Each cycle is accompanied by a UI that shows details about the procedural inputs in each generation.

A final note on the synthesized “human” elements of the piece. These elements are notably distinct from the acoustic sonic material, but are treated as part of each cycle. Of course, the nature of fire in the forest is not static, and human influence is upsetting the balance, with climate change causing more severe fires that disrupt long-established cycles. Still, some human influence—like historical indigenous stewardship of areas including Big Basin, which featured healthy controlled burns—can support both the forest’s natural processes and human coexistence.

“Cycles” was commissioned as part of the Big Basin ArtAbout program, with funding from CA state parks and the Mountain Parks Foundation, 2023–2024.