sonify-viz · Flow regimes · v1.0 · 2026-09-30
Interior Flow, B-side
An extended, drum-led piece from interior British Columbia streamflow. Four water years (a dry, a normal, a late-and-big and an early one with a dry summer) enter one pass at a time as drum voices, each reading its own hydrograph, so their freshets drift in and out of phase. A best guess at a London post-minimal feel: static D pedal, odd-length drum cycles across a steady 4/4, swing, and a slow filter as form. Claude cannot hear it; this page shows what the sound is reading.
Four years, one water year
Flow relative to each catchment's own mean, log scale, regional median. Dim strips have not entered yet. The tick marks the week half the year's water has passed.
Drum cycles
Outer ring: the 16-step bar. Inner rings: cycles of 9, 7, 5 and 3 steps, filled where the flow-set pattern sounds. The marker walks one step per sixteenth, so each cycle lands somewhere new each bar.
Snow, melt and temperature (the regional covariates)
Snowpack sets the filter on the shaker, hats and lead (dull under snow); the drums and sub are not filtered. Melt rate sets the lead's density. Warm weeks (above 10 °C) turn B flat to B natural.
The form, in words
| Starts | Pass | What changes |
|---|
| 0:02 | 1 | Timpani on a 9-step cycle (WY1988, the dry year), with the sub pedal, kick, claps and hats. |
| 1:43 | 2 | The conga joins on a 7-step cycle (WY1995, near normal). Every pattern now starts from a different step. |
| 3:23 | 3 | The log drum joins on a 5-step cycle (WY2012, late, big, wet). At 4:17 the first snowmelt of the pass wakes the harp. |
| 5:04 | 4 | The shaker and triangle join on a 3-step cycle (WY2018, early, dry summer), with river crackle. The marimba now doubles the harp. |
| 6:45 | 5 | All four years, each shifted again against the bar. |
| 8:25 | coda | One conga a bar, fading, over the sub. |
Each pass is one water year, October to September, a week to a bar (52 bars, about 100 seconds), at 124 beats per minute. The picture above shows the same thing as it plays.
What reads what
| Sound | Data | Rule |
|---|
| Timpani, cycle 9 | WY1988, dry | Euclid(k, 9), k from log flow; entry pass 1 |
| Conga, cycle 7 | WY1995, near normal | same rule; entry pass 2 |
| Log drum, cycle 5 | WY2012, late, big, wet | same rule; entry pass 3 |
| Shaker and triangle, cycle 3 | WY2018, early, dry summer | same rule; entry pass 4 (a 3:4 cross-rhythm) |
| Kick and clap | mean level of sounding voices | drop out from week 38 (late June) in bars below a level (a breakdown; it happens in every pass, so it marks the season more than the year) |
| Harp (from pass 3) and marimba (from pass 4), cell of 7 | snowmelt rate | Euclid density, so it sounds only in melt weeks: the harp is first heard at 4:17, in pass 3. From pass 4 a marimba reads the same pattern three steps ahead, an octave down |
| Sub pedal | flow floor (6-week minimum) | sine on D, then C, then B flat, at fixed bars of each pass (a calendar plan) |
Data: catchment-mean Daymet forcing and Water Survey of Canada flow, via the Borealis dataset (Kovacek, CC BY-SA 4.0, doi 10.5683/SP3/65FXAS), interior-BC catchments, WY1988, 1995, 2012, 2018 regional medians. Samples: VSCO 2 Community Edition (CC0). The piece evokes an idiom and takes no melody, sample or voice from any record. Whose land these catchments are on is not yet mapped here; the territory acknowledgement is pending, as for Meridian Chorus.