Natural Sounds

Natural Sounds is a two-part compositional sound art series consisting of Natural Sounds I: Body Compass (2024) and Natural Sounds II: Soft Focus (2025). After leaving Kansas City for the latter half of 2023 due to experiencing extreme discomfort and suffocation, upon my return to KC I sought to use sound to feel more grounded and at home. This is what Natural Sounds I attempted to do. Using soundscape studies as a conceptual backbone, I took field recordings around KC and mapped them to MIDI, then used that information as compositional frameworks to extract the tones and hidden poetics of those locations. The objective of the project was to create a sense of weightlessness to ease the feelings of displacement I was experiencing.  

Rather than relying on music theory and technique, I explored texture and form in sound to illicit an emotional response. Since NS1 assumes the form of an album, an ulterior motive of the project was to frame recorded sound as an art piece: it begs the listener to engage in new ways of understanding the sonic experience beyond passive listening. To encourage this, the project employed elements of the sonic abject with dissonant drones to bring the listener's corporality to the mind's foreground which can be heard in track #1. #4 represents the home, with an airy and repetitive melody.

The tension created from the droning tracks of #6, #7, and #8 is released with soft, enveloping chord progressions on the closing track to achieve a temporary, intoxicating weightlessness in the closing track, #9.

Natural Sounds II: Soft Focus, my senior thesis, responds to its predecessor by exploring how sound occupies space in a different context. It achieves a different kind of weightlessness, one from indulgent hedonism rather than grounded mindfulness. For the work, I employed what I called the “experiential methodology” of the project--  going out into the world, I sought out where electronic music is experienced to understand how sound transforms us individually and communally. Natural Sounds II: Soft Focus follows the arc of the club experience from euphoria to inevitable crash while simultaneously trying to understand why I make what I make. Artmaking, among many other things, is a form of escapism integral to my well-being. Surrendering to sonic envelopment is a way for me to attain some sort of temporary weightlessness and ensure myself peace and freedom from my daily burdens. For the Natural Sounds series, the lived experience is the catalyst of meaning. Observing my community, I have watched sound’s ability to shape and move bodies in space while transgressing boundaries of community vs. individual, simultaneously turning the dance floor into a singular organism while each individual feels like the only dancer in the venue. 

Existing scholarship on electronic dance music and the spaces where it is traditionally experienced tends to be dismissed as hedonistic and shallow. While Natural Sounds II removes sound from space by framing the work as a personal listening experience, this liberation does not dismiss the importance those spaces hold. Rather, it stresses fundamentally embodied experience that I am attempting to emulate through sound.

The tracks of NS2 tell a story of a hellish night out. The project opens with the track Infinity, a straightforward, lighthearted track that encapsulates the brevity and excitement of the night.

Then moves in Automatic, a stable, unchanging chord progression overpowered by conglomerate of chaotic drums, but still has some headspace for brief moments of clarity and relief. Ketamine / Soft Focus marks the turn of the night, where the panic and overwhelm starts to manifest. The project then closes with a sobering moment of remixes of pre-NS1 work that I made while I was living in Philly to mark the end of the series.

Natural Sounds II reflects on and crystallizes the club experience through recorded sound. Each track narrates personal encounters that I have had with sound in social spaces – some beautiful, some terrifying. The work considers the psychological processing that occurs when one has an embodied sonic experience. What is a sonic experience? Sound is an extremely subjective medium – especially when it is experienced in a space. Each person, in the instance of Natural Sounds II, are having unique experiences in the club setting and are moved very differently through sound.

Recording devices are often seen as objective observers. NS2, however, does not aim to reflect reality, which is why field recordings could not have served the work’s purpose. Sound is a transient medium. Sonic experiences cannot be accurately recorded nor replicated, only interpreted from the (unreliable) imagination of the changed mind and body.

Natural Sounds II translates my personal encounters with techno raves and electronic dance music’s “homes” into compositions to communicate my subjective, internalized experiences to others to interpret and apply their own perspectives. Club experiences are psychologically complex -- sound is a conduit for heightened, euphoric, and emotionally charged experiences. These moments feel like forever, and then they are gone in an instant. NS2 taps into these moments and opens space where the mind can process these brief internal events in retrospect.

What does intensity sound like? What does euphoria sound like? What elements of sound appeal to a sense of closeness – is it comforting or suffocating? How do I evoke and translate these ephemeral sensations in a recorded format, that translates to the listener and presents the sonic experience that lives in my memory, my imagination?

Natural Sounds II: Soft Focus released on June 6th, 2025 via Crane Operator. Limited edition compact discs can be purchased through their website here.

Streaming everywhere.

All music and visuals made by Brette-Shiloh Smith, except for Comfortable, which was co-composed by Zak Gorsuch and Brette-Shiloh Smith.

Recorded, mixed and mastered from 2024-2025 in Kansas City, MO.

Mixed and mastered by Brette-Shiloh Smith and Cyan Meeks.

Special thank yous to

Katie Espino (@localuva69) for her generosity, kindness, and raw talent. It is you who took me into the beautiful land of the techno deejaying realm. Your work, taste, and expression of love for community and creativity through music is at the heart of Natural Sounds II and I am so lucky to have crossed paths with you.

Cyan Meeks for her creative and technical guidance, unfaltering wisdom and support. My practice is eternally indebted to you - because of you I am a lifelong artist and learner.

Zak Gorsuch (@zakgorsuch) for his unconditional support and creative partnership. I cannot thank you enough for the hours you have spent listening and responding to every demo, every sound, every installation I have ever made (every single one, no joke). Your influence, feedback, and thoughts have shaped everything I have ever made and you will continue to write my practice in ways known and unknown to me.