Icescapes

Icescapes is a unique collection of sound-designed atmospheric leads, ambient synths, textural soundscapes and snow and ice sound effects capturing the heart of winter. The wintery pond instruments were created by skipping a variety of stones, ice chunks and pebbles across the surface of a large frozen pond in a narrow canyon, high in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. These skittering impacts across the ice sheet emit a strange sci-fi ray gun zinging effect caused by an acoustic phenomenon called flexural waves, a type of bending sound wave produced by the acoustic ripples that radiate out at supersonic speeds from the point of each impact, amplified upward by the pond's large resonant ice membrane into the high craggy canyon walls that surrounded us. The ice and snow instruments are built from a variety of ice block impacts and slides, and from hand and boot foley recorded in deep fresh snow.

The natural snow and ice sound effects work well when used creatively to replace traditional kicks, snares and hi-hats or as pure sound-design source material. Each sound bank is arranged to create percussive playability and organized logically to allow efficient use as SFX. Then from these organic sound sources, we've used a bit of our signature sonic alchemy to cultivate a broad selection of 83 playable sound-designed tones, pads, synth-scapes, creative effects and tuned drones for use in any kind of musical creation.