andre mount soundblog

This last semester was busy. And busy semesters are usually stressful semesters. It should have been a lot more stressful, though, seeing as how we have a new baby in the house. (I need to be careful what I say here, since Sarah has been doing most of the rearing while I finished my last semester pre-parental-leave…) But this baby is an easy baby! Unlike her angry predecessor (who shall remain nameless), Juniper wants nothing more than to catch your eye and smile back at you. She has moments of discontent, of course, but for the most part she is one laid back baby!

We’ve got a electric baby swing in the living room. It doesn’t look very nice and it takes up a lot of space, but it was one of the few reliable methods we had of calming Angry Otis when he was a baby. The clicks and creaks the swing makes have therefore come to be very relaxing sounds in my ears. Here’s June in the swing on a rainy day while I napped (recorded) on the couch nearby.

Read more

Trips to the Berkshires are always very busy. We have this sense that very little–and almost nothing kid-friendly–happens up in Potsdam, so when we make our way down to civilization it’s a flurry of food, entertainment, and cultural activity. Sarah found a recommendation for a little park up in the hills by North Adams and we had an afternoon activity.

It was a bit of a drive, so to fill out the excursion we decided to stop at a couple of sound sculptures in and around Mass MoCA. The first was Corrugarou, a “musical house” by Andrew Schrock and Klaas Hübner. This alone was worth the trip. Behind some bushes, next to a busy intersection, we found a small structure with all sorts of pipes, panels, brackets, and bars sticking out of it. Down at the bottom we found a bunch of brass cranks which, when cranked, spun large spiraled tubes up above.

The sound was incredible. When I was a kid I had an oversized plastic flexi-straw that I would swing around in the air. It made a very distinct and memorable whistling sound. Corrugarou sounded like a whole flock of swung flexi-straws.

Read more

Back in August, we went down to visit Pops and Oma. Before heading back up north with them for a long-in-the-works Lake Monsters game), we thought it’d be a good idea to take advantage of the good weather and dip Otis in the river. We heard some wildlife along the road and instructed Otis to listen. Here’s what he heard on the lower part of Lobnuts Ln. in Elizabethtown.

Read more

Keeping up two blogs was more work than I thought it’d be! (And this semester was busier than I thought it’d be!) The photoblog made it through most of the semester, but this sound blog suffered a bit… Well, I’ve got the next eight months off so suffer no more little blog! New post on Sunday at 4:33am!

Otis started swimming lessons this summer. It was an incredible deal: $20 for a full summer’s worth of lessons with, I think, a Red-Cross certified instructor! Granted, the lessons were just a half hour, but they met every weekday for two months. Otis and I settled into a routine of a leisurely breakfast followed by a frantic last-minute search for sunscreen and towels every morning, followed by a quick drive over to Postwood Park in Hannawa Falls (usually listening to bluegrass or Buzzcocks on the way). Otis sometimes needed coaxing into the water, but usually he was pretty gung-ho. I brought a chair and sat with the moms (and a few other dads) on the beach. Afterward, we’d treat ourselves to an apple fritter snack at Stewarts before parting ways: Otis to daycare and Dad to the deck construction site.

Read more

We used to live right by the river in West Stockholm. The St. Regis River flowed right past our house and you could hear the water from our bedroom. Sometimes there was a lot, sometimes just a little. There was a large rock peninsula, too, that was perfect for lounging and drinking beer in the summertime.

Read more

After Juniper was born, they kept her in the NICU for a few nights. Because she came out so early, she had very low blood sugar and, later, high bilirubin levels. They gave her an IV with dextrose, then slowly weaned her off of it through a combination of breast- and bottle-feeding over the following days. Sarah and I stayed in a room in the Mother Baby Unit and made the trek down Party Corridor many times each day (Sarah many more times than I).

I don’t know about Sarah, but I found being in the NICU to be a strange combination of comforting and unnerving. There were a lot of rules and for good reason. There were a lot of tiny babies in there, most of them in need of much more intensive care than Juniper. But aside from one lengthy episode where Juniper gave a couple of vein-seeking young nurses a hard time, the staff was totally competent and confidence inspiring.

Aside from knowing where I was and what was happening around me, the sight and sound of the NICU matched my mood there. At night, the room was bathed in a weird purple glow, punctuated with the many flashing lights of various monitoring systems. It was cool inside. Too cool for me in a T-shirt, but not for our little baby lying mostly naked in her heated cart. The hum of the air conditioning covered up most of the other sounds, but you would almost always be aware of some unintelligible nurse murmurs somewhere else in the room.

We were glad to be there, but I’m also glad to be out.

Read more

For pretty much her whole first month, all Juniper did was eat, sleep, poop, and hiccup. Not bad!

Read more

Our neighbors across the street have a couple of older kids, so there’s usually at least one small pile of stuff on the curb out in front of their houses. I recently spotted a gallon sized zip-lock bag in the pile with a bunch of colorful plastic tiles. There were also a bunch of large rectangular cards in the bag and I recognized the whole set as a kind of tangram-esque puzzle game. Turns out it’s a MightMind kit made by Leisure Learning Products, Inc. (who still, for some reason, sort their toys into boys and girls categories).  Otis loves it. And he’s really good at it too. Once he got through all (or at least most) of the cards, he started making his own designs. Then he started coming up with other things to do with the tiles. Like spinning them. Hear him spin a round tile for a while with the Potsdam Fire siren wailing in the background. “It makes cool sounds,” he notes. Indeed!

Read more

We had a composer friend in Berkeley named Sivan. She urged us—on several occasions as I recall—that if we ever had kids, to record the sounds they made when they were babies. That way, if the kids grew up and decided to become composers, they would have some biographical material to work with. Well, Sivan, here’s the sound of Juniper’s in utero heartbeat (with big brother Otis muttering about some blue thing in the background).

Read more