Resonant Anomalies and Sonic Legends: Field Notes on the Acoustic Phenomena of Chateaugay Lake and Its Influence on Avant-Garde Music
Advisory: Contains graphic descriptions of distorted frequencies, mind-altering reverberations, and possible Wendigo encounters. For academic researchers, composers, and sonic ethnographers exploring liminal spaces in sound.
Archival Analysis of the Bartók Wire Recording, Saranac Lake (1945) University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign Center for Advanced Studies in Electroacoustic Research Prepared by: Dr. Howard LeClair, Dept. of Music Theory and Electronic Composition, 1973 Assisted by: Karen Ippolito, Graduate Research Fellow in Sonic Folklore
Abstract:
In 1972, a mislabeled aluminum canister containing a 1945 steel wire field recording was discovered in the estate archive of Hungarian-American composer Béla Bartók, catalogued in the basement of the Sibley Music Library, Rochester, New York. This analysis documents the contents of the recording—hereafter referred to as Bartók Wire 13b-Saranac—and explores its spectral, contextual, and speculative significance. The tape contains what appears to be an undocumented “parafolkloric” sonic phenomenon recorded during Bartók’s final ethnomusicological excursions in the Adirondack Mountains. The recording, while sonically degraded, reveals a unique hybridization of environmental ambience, human presence, and an unidentifiable acoustic signal consistent with neither known animal calls nor machine noise. The implications of this artifact have catalyzed renewed interest among electroacoustic composers and folklorists in the interpenetration of hallucinated myth and found sound.
I. Historical and Methodological Context
Bartók’s late field research in North America is often considered his final act of resistance against cultural erasure, attempting to record undocumented “migrant melodies” of both human and unnatural origin. By 1945, he was working with early portable magnetic and steel-wire recorders, including the Brush Soundmirror and pre-Wollensak prototypes, likely provided by his colleagues at Columbia University’s Anthropology Department. The recording in question, made during an private expedition to Saranac Lake, is presumed to have been recorded on a 0.006-inch steel wire at 24 ips (inches per second).
Following recovery and mechanical digitization by the Experimental Music Studio at UIUC under the direction of Salvatore Martirano, Bartók Wire 13b-Saranac was subjected to spectral analysis via the analog-digital hybrid Synclavier II prototype.
II. Contents of the Recording
Timecode Breakdown (Restored Runtime: 03:37)
00:00 – 00:23 – Low-frequency ambient noise, consistent with wind through conifers and hydrophonic lake modulation; possible presence of surface ice.
00:24 – 00:41 – Human breath, staggered pacing, and incidental friction (likely Bartók’s overcoat or satchel).
00:42 – 01:17 – Emergence of faint rhythmic signal: a three-pulse motif, irregular, broadband noise envelope; spectral peaks at 134 Hz, 412 Hz, and 870 Hz, with subtle frequency modulation.
01:18 – 02:03 – Vocalization (?): a sustained harmonic overtone rich in subharmonic content, bearing resemblance to Inuit katajjaq throat singing but lacking human formant structures.
02:04 – 02:12 – Fragmented phonemes; speculative reversed or non-phonemic utterance; debated origin (see Section IV).
02:13 – 03:12 – Collapse into radio-static textures with embedded periodicity; possibly Bartók repositioning the microphone; possible autonomic speech.
03:13 – 03:37 – Termination with metallic snap and silence. The wire ends abruptly, suggesting the device may have been manually stopped or failed due to external trauma.
IIII. Acoustic and Compositional Implications
When analyzed using narrowband FFT, the middle section of the recording demonstrates non-linear frequency interactions consistent with complex feedback structures—not unlike early experiments with tape delay and microphonic re-entrance as later deployed by Cage, Tudor, and Stockhausen. The harmonic instability, in particular, evokes the later developments of Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room (1969), wherein the resonant frequencies of a space gradually dissolve speech into pure sound, creating a sonic topology shaped by architecture itself.
Interestingly, recent anecdotal evidence presented at the 1971 Sonic Frontiers Conference at Bennington College suggests that Lucier conceived the fundamental process of that piece during a short, undocumented stay at the Banner House on Lower Chateaugay Lake in the summer of 1968. According to remarks he made during a panel on “Architecture as Instrument,” Lucier described being “rattled” during a nocturnal recording session conducted in what was then the abandoned east parlor, where he attempted to record the natural reverberation of the space using a Nagra III portable recorder and a directional Sennheiser microphone.
Lucier claimed that the session was “unexpectedly interrupted by a low, guttural breath that seemed to emanate not from any human throat, but from the floorboards themselves.” This experience, though often recounted with a degree of ambiguity and even ironic detachment by Lucier in later years, was confirmed by composer Annea Lockwood, who stated in a 1975 interview that Lucier had confessed to her that he believed he may have encountered “some sort of sonic entity—or Wendigo, as the locals later called it.”
Whether myth or metaphor, this encounter appears to have had a profound influence on Lucier’s evolving interest in acoustic space as a dynamic participant in the act of listening and memory. The parallel to Bartók’s 1945 Wire 13b-Saranac recording is striking: both composers, separated by nearly twenty-five years and vastly different technological conditions, arrived at sonic territories shaped not merely by instrument or intention, but by environmental hauntings—auditory phenomena at the edge of perception and myth.
In this way, Bartók Wire 13b-Saranac does more than prefigure a lineage of spatialized composition—it offers an unsettling origin myth for the entire genre of electroacoustic minimalism: a moment when the room, the machine, and something “other” began to compose back.
IV. The “Wendigo Hypothesis”
The spectral vocalization between 01:18 and 02:03 has been the subject of considerable debate. Initial suggestions of animal origin (e.g., moose in mating call) have been discounted due to the absence of laryngeal signature and the microtonal glissandi, which resemble deliberate intonation. Linguists consulted (see Appendix B) have failed to match the phoneme fragments with any known Native or European language.
Dr. Jerome Danforth (Folklore and Mythic Structures, UIUC) posits that the voice may represent an instance of what he terms acousmatic revenance—a mythic entity encoded as sonic recurrence. Referencing Abenaki accounts of wendigoak, entities of wind and hunger, he theorizes that Bartók may have captured a culturally resonant, perhaps psychoacoustically induced event—a kind of acoustic pareidolia occurring in a liminal, emotionally vulnerable context.
This leads us to propose a working hypothesis: that Bartók Wire 13b-Saranac is not merely a field recording, but an inadvertent early electroacoustic composition created by the interaction between a human consciousness and an environment saturated in myth, signal, and silence.
V. Conclusion
Bartók Wire 13b-Saranac stands as a compelling prefiguration of electroacoustic philosophy: the fusion of memory, technology, myth, and sonic abstraction. It is not only a compositional fossil but a challenge to our taxonomies of music and meaning. Its rediscovery in the context of 1970s electronic music praxis places Bartók not only as a folklorist and composer, but—perhaps unknowingly—as one of the originators of the psychogeographic soundwork, a genre that bends the boundaries of ethnography, hallucination, and spectral poetics.
We recommend that this artifact be preserved under the joint custodianship of the Electronic Music Studio and the Folklore Archive, and that further interdisciplinary analysis be conducted—preferably before the autumnal equinox.
Appendix A: Spectral Analysis Graphs Appendix B: Comparative Linguistic Matrix Appendix C: Interview with Abenaki Consultant, Joseph Three Feathers (March 1973) Appendix D: Audio Restoration Logs and Wire-to-Tape Transfer Methodology
Field Recording Journal Entry by Claude Debussy, 1891 Upper Chateaugay Lake, Merrill House
Of Fog and Forgotten Echoes The evening is a slow exhalation of breath, the fog unfurling itself like a veil woven from the silence between stars. It transforms the world into a smudged charcoal sketch—edges blurred, forms dissolving into the half-dreamt. The steamboats on the lake exhale their low, sonorous breath, a rhythm that hums beneath the skin, ancestral and murmurous, as if the water itself remembers the pulse of some primordial hymn.
Near dawn, I drifted toward the shore, lured not by sight but by the metallic shiver of sound—clangs and shudders that scattered like broken glass across the mist. A cacophony without score, without order, as though Time had loosened its grip and let the world slide into dissonance. The pirates (if such a word still holds meaning) had long abandoned the tyranny of strings and reeds. One man, his shadow a jagged cut against the haze, struck a hollowed pipe with a hammer, each blow a raw, copper cry. Another bent over the corpse of an accordion, squeezing not melody but a gasping, animal wail from its ribs. The vessels moaned as they pressed against the dock, their timbers whispering secrets of storms and silt, while the air thickened with the sweat of engines and pine.
Lake Chateaugay trembles tonight. Not with fear, but with the fever of revelation. These sounds—this clangor of hull and hammer, breath and rebellion—they are not chaos. They are a lexicon written not in notes but in breath and rupture, a grammar of resistance. How small our violins seem now, our polished pianos! Here, music is not crafted; it ruptures, spills from the cracks in the world like sap from a wounded tree. I feel it rewriting my bones, this symphony of the ungovernable. Let them call it noise. I hear the future in its jagged teeth.
To stand here is to eavesdrop on the clandestine. The world sleeps, but the fog is alive—a chorus of creaks and sighs, of wood aching under the weight of its own history. Harmony is a delusion of the civilized ear. True music dwells in the fracture, the groan, the unanswerable question. Something older than scales thrums here, older than harps or hymns. The lake guards it, this secret, in the belly of its mists. Or perhaps the mists guard the lake. Who can say? Even the tales of specters and silt-dwellers seem to hum beneath these waves, their voices tangled in the pirates’ discordant psalm.
Is it madness, to hear divinity in the clang of metal? Or is it madness to deny it? The fog, at least, does not judge. It simply lingers, a collaborator in this silent, splendid heresy.
Field Recording Journal Entry by Béla Bartók, 1945 Saranac Lake, Adirondack Mountains
It has long been my experience that instruments, even mechanical ones, may acquire a strange fidelity when applied with patience and reverence. The tape recorder—an apparatus devoid of soul, yet uncannily attuned to the subtleties of sound—has accompanied me for years now, humming steadily at my side, registering with impartial clarity the murmurings of wind, the rhythm of footfall, and the polyphonic cries of nocturnal birds. But on the night of which I now speak, even this faithful mechanism could not dispel the impression of a silence that was not ordinary, but oppressive—indeed, premonitory.
I had set myself to fieldwork beneath the lower slopes of Lyon Mountain—an area sparsely inhabited and rich, I had believed, in unspoiled sonic material—particularly the vocalizations of forest fauna whose patterns may, I hoped, bear structural resemblance to archaic folk intonations. Yet, during the course of my observations, I encountered not the vibrant polyphony of the woods, but a stillness—complete, abrupt, and unnatural. Even the ubiquitous chirr of insects had withdrawn, as if the very pulse of the land had ceased.
It would be misguided to assert that feelings of unease are foreign to the folklorist engaged in isolated terrain. Indeed, the sensation of being watched is a familiar psychological consequence of immersion in unpeopled places. But what I experienced was something more acute, more concentrated. My breath grew labored; the atmosphere, though unchanged in temperature, grew suddenly heavy, as if the air itself had acquired density.
The first audible sign came not to the ear directly, but to the microphone: a faint scraping, scarcely discernible, akin to claws upon bark—organic, yet ambiguous. I turned instinctively, but saw only the immobile outlines of tree trunks and the motionless limbs of sleeping oaks. No evidence of disturbance could be seen, and yet my skin had gone cold.
It is worth noting that such moments often elude the conscious ear in real time. The mechanical listener, however—being without fear or preconception—does not fail. And when, later, I replayed the recording, it revealed a low frequency vibration—a guttural resonance situated somewhere between the growl of a beast and the drone of a bowed string. Not animal, precisely, and not man-made either. But very near.
I ought to have departed. And yet, I did not. Whether due to the compulsion of scholarly duty or that deeper and irrational drive which urges the seeker ever forward into the unknown, I remained rooted. The sound developed: it began to modulate, acquiring a cadence, a primitive chant-like rhythm—interrupted, arrhythmic, yet unmistakably constructed. It resembled no melody known to any tradition I had studied; rather, it was composed of fragments, tonal splinters from no identifiable whole.
I cannot say I saw the source, at first. Rather, I felt its presence: the temperature shifted, the foliage stiffened, and a shape seemed to emerge—not visible directly, but inferred through absence. A figure—not wholly human in configuration—moved beyond the boundary of my sightline. It had height, perhaps even posture, but it was warped in proportion; its movement was silent, fluid, and disjointed.
What struck me most were the eyes—if that is the proper term. They were not bestial, nor anthropoid, but possessed of a gaze that negated familiarity. I felt, in their presence, that the forest around me had awakened—not metaphorically, but in truth—and that I, who had sought to record its song, had become the object of its attention. My limbs, usually quick to act in such moments, would not move. I was held, not by fear precisely, but by something deeper—reverence, perhaps, or paralysis before the inexplicable.
Time ceased to function in ordinary increments. Whether I stood thus for seconds or hours, I do not know. The presence made no advance. It merely observed.
Then, as suddenly as it began, the moment passed. The heaviness lifted. The birds resumed their calls. The wind resumed its movement. The forest—so recently silent and alien—reasserted its familiar symphony. I became aware again of my own breath, of my heartbeat.
Yet the tape recorder—the only unblinking witness—captured more. At the very end of the incident, there emerged a tone, singular and resonant, that seemed to pierce bone rather than ear. And within this sound—masked by static, obscured by distortion—was a voice. Or what may once have been a voice. A word, perhaps, uttered in a language either lost or never meant for human transmission. I cannot translate it. I do not wish to.
I will soon depart this region. The forest, once a repository of ancient musical impulse, now feels occluded, as if it watches rather than sings. One does not conduct fieldwork in a cathedral at the moment of consecration. To remain would be sacrilege.
And yet, I am left with a conviction—not of danger, but of revelation. The truest music is not that which we hear in the birdcall or the instrument. It is what resounds in the interstices—between understanding and terror, between presence and absence. The earth itself contains melodies we are not yet meant to comprehend.
Excerpt from Proceedings of the Sonic Frontiers Conference
Panel: “Architecture as Instrument” – Bennington College, October 12, 1971 Transcribed remarks attributed to Alvin Lucier, with supplementary annotation by Annea Lockwood (1975, Mills Tape Archives)
“I have found that certain rooms remember sound. Not emotionally. Not in metaphor. But physically. Structurally.
A room retains the conditions of resonance—what frequencies excite it, where nodes fall, how standing waves settle along a wall or beam. These preferences are not symbolic. They are mechanical. Acoustic.
In the summer of 1968, I stayed at an Adirondack resort on Lower Chateaugay Lake. It was called the Banner House. The building had typical period materials: plaster over lath, narrow corridors, cedar exterior. Some walls rang. Others absorbed. The parlor on the east side had once hosted music.
I set up a standard feedback process. I recorded my voice, played the tape back into the space, re-recorded the playback, and repeated the cycle. Each iteration allowed the room to emphasize its favored frequencies—to gradually filter the signal through its own resonant profile.
After three passes, I noticed a change. A portion of the signal did not return. There was no technical malfunction. The recorder worked. The microphone was fine. But something had been removed. A frequency that should have repeated was absent.
What remained was not noise, exactly. It was shaped. Breath-like. Not mine.
The windows were shut. No wind. No insects. No traffic.
On the fourth playback, a new signal was present. Low. Broad. Slightly modulated. It had the character of water—not in motion, but in presence. As if the room itself had begun to exhale.
I stopped the experiment. I made no further recordings that night.”
Commentary by Annea Lockwood (Letter to Dr. Loren Karp, 1975)
“I remember Alvin telling me about the Banner House session over bitter tea in New Haven, spring of ’71. He didn’t say he believed in spirits, of course—not Alvin—but he did say, quite calmly, ‘I no longer assume I’m the only one listening.’
He described the parlor in detail: faded sheet music nailed to the wainscot, spiderwebs like antennae. He said it was a room with ‘too much reverb for one body.’
What chilled me most was his phrasing. He said: ‘It didn’t feel like the room was empty. It felt like it had been waiting for someone to notice it could breathe.’
After that, he always paused before entering any unfamiliar recording space. Just to listen. Just in case it was already listening back.”
— A. Lockwood, Mills College Tape Archives, Correspondence Collection, 1975
Annotated Footnote, Proceedings Editor (1976):
Although Lucier made no direct claim regarding the folkloric entity known in Abenaki and Cree traditions as a “Wendigo,” several contemporaries, including Pauline Oliveros and Robert Ashley, later alluded to the Chateaugay Lake region’s reputation for “listening spirits” and “aural predators.” The coincidence between this session and Lucier’s development of I Am Sitting in a Room has prompted speculative analyses regarding the influence of extra-human agencies on the origins of acoustic process composition. Lucier declined to comment further in subsequent interviews.
FFT Analysis Summary: Banner House Session
A spectral analysis of the surviving audio file from the Banner House Session (Wire Archive ID: BH-FFT-1891L), conducted using a 4096-point FFT with Hanning windowing and 50% overlap, revealed anomalous low-frequency modulations between 17–22 Hz—barely within the threshold of human perception. These sub-audible pulsations display an irregular rhythmic decay inconsistent with standard room modes, even accounting for the asymmetrical floor plan of the Banner House parlor (as reconstructed from 1890s architectural records). A ghost harmonic cluster emerges at approximately 1412 Hz, exhibiting sustained inharmonicity and spectral flutter across three overlapping transients. A sinusoidal “breath” form—visible in the waveform as a convex undulation peaking at 03:13—produces a fricative texture that FFT decomposition fails to resolve into discrete source events. The sonic event, termed by analysts as Spectral Envelope 3-W, is acoustically inconsistent with human vocal patterns, mechanical tape anomalies, or known atmospheric interference. The waveform and spectrogram, then, capture not merely environmental presence but an acoustic otherness: sound shaped by an architectural container—and possibly, a consciousness.
Speculative Framework: Sonic Geology, Acoustic Animism, and Electroacoustic Emergence in the Chateaugay Terrain
The acoustic properties of the Chateaugay Lake region—its fluctuating shoreline contours, dense coniferous absorptive textures, and iron-rich substrata—yield a natural resonator system of bewildering unpredictability. While Bartók’s Wire 13b-Saranac captures what appears to be a moment of anomalous reverberation or electronic bleed-through, we posit a broader influence: that the region’s environmental topology operates not as passive vessel, but active participant in acoustic shaping.
In this framework, the dense geological iron base beneath the lake operates as a natural inductor, subtly transducing and re-shaping airborne frequencies. Similar to an untuned coil buried in the earth, this mineral body refracts and recycles low-band vibrations. These shifts manifest most strongly in field recordings, especially those made near liminal times—twilight, mistbreak, and barometric inversion. When Alvin Lucier visited the Banner House for a summer residency, reports note that he could not complete the third iteration of his I Am Sitting in a Room experiment. The resonance collapsed into self-interference—pulses stacking on pulses—until the room “spoke back,” in his words, with what he later described at Darmstadt as “someone else’s mouth.”
It would be academically irresponsible to attribute this solely to room acoustics. Yet it would be equally negligent to ignore the continuity between this event and the improvisational strategies of the 1870s steamboat performers on Chateaugay Lake, who described themselves as “caught up by the breath of the lake” during performances. These jam sessions, involving detuned pump organs, iron stoves, and found objects, occurred not merely on the water but with it—responding to wave slap, foghorn echo, and the metal throb of the paddle-wheel. Their aesthetic was not additive but subtractive, a porous practice that left space for interruptions—an owl, a ripple, a rustle no one could place.
These practices anticipated the later logic of site-specific electroacoustics, wherein a space’s acoustic profile becomes the composer. What Bartók’s wire recordings suggest—particularly 13b-Saranac, recorded near the treeline in February 1945—is that such space might not be neutral. His annotations mention “percussive snow” and “breath-howl through wire,” language inconsistent with the objective cataloging tone he typically employed in his ethnographic work.
In this way, Wire 13b-Saranac does more than prefigure a lineage of spatialized composition. It suggests the possibility that electroacoustic minimalism, as a genre, did not originate solely in academic studios or cathedral reverbs, but in an encounter: a moment in which the room, the land, and something unseen began to compose back. These are not merely sounds but responses. The machines were listening. The lake was answering.
And the breath—that convex envelope—is still being modeled. Still unresolved. Still breathing.
Recovered Field Notes of Karlheinz Stockhausen Chateaugay Lake, Clinton and Franklin Counties, NY – August 17–19, 1968 Archived Fragment: Notational Ledger, Linen-Bound; Graphite on Paper; Annotated in Red Crayon (presumed later). Source: University of Illinois Musicology Archives, Accession ID UIUC-KS1968/CL.
DAY 1 – AUGUST 17, 1968 – 08:33 AM Weather: Pale overcast, barometric pressure low and shifting. Arrived at Upper Lake site via hired car from Montreal airport. Immediate difference in air density—cool, sluggish. Set up facing northwest treeline. Equipment: — EMS VCS 3 Synth (untuned) — Dual Revox A77s — 4 sine-wave oscillators — 2 directional microphones — 3 tuning forks (A440, A432, “unknown”) — 1 compass (nonfunctional by 09:00)
Observation: On activation of sine sweep (14 Hz–4 kHz), ambient sound returned sweep in irregular echo—unsure if standing wave or external acoustic response. Felt in thorax. Log: “The lake replies in its own voice—not like a cathedral, but like a mouth behind a curtain.”
14:19 PM: Birdsong ceased during harmonic cluster experiments (2.3 kHz overlay, stacked fourths). Frogs louder. Note: Birdsong returned only in microtonal echo after generators powered down. Marked as event A. Labeled in margin: “Nicht durch mich.” (Not through me.)
DAY 2 – AUGUST 18, 1968 – 05:42 AM Awoke from dream where the lake performed its own music using me as the sounding box. My hands struck rocks like claves. I wept, but not from sadness. Set up system near overgrown root structure east of dock. Began improvisation by listening only. Tuning forks set in motion by air. Not struck. Still, they sounded.
Tape Notes – Reel #3: Continuous low-frequency oscillation (19–21 Hz) not generated by equipment. Revox meters spike in the silence. Electrical input steady—but something plays with time. Handwriting becomes erratic.
Field scribble (later underlined in red):
“They do not speak as men, but their rhythms pull at mine. The longer I sit, the less I write. The less I write, the more they begin to compose.”
Disruption at 16:07: All oscillators fall silent. Revox units stop. Tuning forks silent. But tape playback reveals reversed phrases, as if I had spoken them. But I had not.
Auditory hallucination? Phrase heard: “Bleib nicht.” (“Do not stay.”)
Retreated to cabin. Equipment left untouched.
DAY 3 – AUGUST 19, 1968 – Abandoned Entry Notebook contains only a single red wax mark across the page—resembles waveform. Log ends here.
Postscript (Archivist Annotation – 1973): Equipment found three days later, humming faintly, despite battery depletion. One Revox unit spooling empty tape. Local witness (Leroy Blaisdell, age 74) claimed he saw the composer “walk backward into the trees… like he’d forgotten how to go forward.” Stockhausen never spoke of the incident. Yet in his 1968 composition cycle Aus den Sieben Tagen, especially “Abstieg” and “Setz die Segel zur Sonne,” we find direct instructions for musical surrender—“play the sounds you hear inside the sound,”—suggesting the Upper Chateaugay experience was integrated, if only in parable.
The final page of his notebook contains an unfinished score titled simply:
“Für den See” (For the Lake) No notes. Only rests.
What mysteries of Chateaugay Lake haunt you?