Olympia Old Time Festival (Squaredances)

I was able to go to one day of the Oly Old Time Festival, a yearly event celebrating American folk musics, and take a couple field recordings. There are three recordings of square dances, two of the family dance and one of the night dance. I enjoyed myself immensely, learned new perspectives from the workshops and came away very happy.

I modeled the electronics after a square dance that was taught where there are two lines of dancers with one dancer at the head of both (they used a stuffed animal and I didn’t catch the name of the dance). The head of the line takes a partner and takes them down to the end, and the dancer who didn’t get chosen becomes the new chooser. I haven’t seen this form of shuffling before, so I tried to put into a musical format: each of the seven dancers is a different tone/part of a field recording (one is violins & 275hz, another is shouts & 100hz, another is stomps & 440, etc.). The end of the lines are the softest, and are split into the right and left channels, getting louder as they approach the chooser, while the chooser is in both channels and oscillates in volume a bit. Hardish to hear, but it holds up to analysis, which really is all that matters in music anyway right? Here is an image of the pure data patch. VERY messy, but I didn’t really have a fully realized plan as to what needed to happen, so I had to make up a lot as I went.

Thank you to Emily, Erik, and Ruby.