Oaks Bottom

Great night’s rest at our friends Mike and Alyssa’s place in Portland. After a small work party, we rode alongside the Willamette to Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge, where Ursa suggested we make a waystation. Upon planting, we did one of our Sense-able Sonic Meditation prompts called ‘Sympathetic Sounding’:

The sympathetic strings of Hindustani and Western Baroque instruments such as the sitar and the viola d’amore primarily function to add resonance to the plucked strings. Sympathetic strings are typically tuned to the scale of a given composition so that when a plucked note resounds, it sets in motion the corresponding sympathetic string to enrich the overall tone. For this prompt, the musician is invited to make soundings as if they were a sympathetic string — by attuning to and resonating with environmental sounds. Begin by listening to the sounds around you then let these sounds ‘set your instrument in motion.’

-Ale and Ursa