Richard Hamilton

Tools for Multispecies Fluorishing

2024

Richard Hamilton is the co-owner of Dragonfly Audio Post and an award-winning sound designer, mixer, and film/tv composer with over a decade of experience. He has mixed and sound designed for clients such as Google, Coors Light, Verizon, and Waze. His commercial credits include a 2020 Super Bowl Spot for IDEA Schools, two short branded documentaries for Google Earth and NASA, and an Webby Award-winning branded documentary for The Harvard Project & the NAAF about a Native American School district in Southern Arizona dealing with COVID-19.

He has supervised feature films including the satirical conspiracy horror film The Pizzagate Massacre directed by John Valley, the award-winning horror/comedy film Home Body directed by Zach Endres, and the drama/thriller Periphery starring Tessa Thompson, Jesse Garcia, and directed by Duane Allen Humeyestewa. Rich is also an accomplished composer, scoring numerous projects including theme songs and jingles for commercials, podcasts, Google, and an animated TV pilot. Most notably, he scored the award winning short films Mud and Honey directed by Molly Sorensen and distributed by Focus Features and JetBlue Airlines, Malignant directed by Nick Grisham and Morgan Bond which premiered at SXSW in 2021, and Sundown Road directed by M. Asli Dukan which premiered at the Black Star Film Festival in 2023.

Rich’s soundscapes have also been featured at art festivals worldwide, including the Megapolis Sound Art Festival in Philadelphia and Radiophrenia in the Centre for Contemporary Art in Glasgow, Scotland.

Rich debuted his Ecotopian Tool, Auscultation Points at his workshop in May 2024. This soundscape encourages you to immerse yourself and reflect on the parts of the arboretum that we typically hear, along with those sounds we cannot hear without assistance. These unheard sounds play a larger role in the health and stability of the ecosystem than we often realize.

This soundscape acts as an audio diagnosis of the overall ecosystem of the Morris Arboretum & Gardens.

Over several visits, Rich used various microphones to record sounds from plants, animals, and bodies of water. He then returned to the studio to layer and sometimes distort these sounds. The result is a soundscape that reflects the beauty of this place while highlighting human encroachment on nature and the potential losses if we don’t change our ways.

RPH · Auscultation Points

These timecode markers give a glimpse into the layers of sounds & techniques you’ll hear as you listen to Auscultation Points…

00:22 — Made with my recorder over multiple days while walking the whole arboretum
06:19 — Hydrophone directed under a waterfall in the creek
07:52 — Drainage pipe in right ear and moss gathering water in left
08:42 — Metal sounds are people walking on the tree canopy walk
09:50 — Inside a small tree shaking in the wind
10:08 — Grass movement in right ear
11:28 — Heavily manipulated recording of the bell sculpture near the canopy walk (you can even hear birds singing through it)
12:51 — Ultrasonic Recordings of songbirds pitched down 24 octaves
13:13 — Pops in left and right ear are recordings of tree sap from inside a tree
14:38 — Recordings of moss heavily time stretched
15:39 — Geese from earlier in the piece time stretched over 100 times
18:51 — Ultrasonic recording of a bat, pitched down 19 semi tones, it’s the really high squeaking
21:55 — Bat clicks as it flies by the mic
22:40 — Electromagnetic recordings of radio waves from around the park