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Experience Tippet Rise via Site Sounds, an online portal to the art center’s land and sky

September 29, 2021

We invite you to explore Site Sounds, a growing collection of “soundscapes” from Tippet Rise. Produced by our Audio/Visual team—Monte Nickles, Jim Ruberto, James Joyce, and Kevin Richey—with Music Programs Coordinator Zack Patten, the project serves a dual purpose: to record the ever-changing character of the land and sky at Tippet Rise and to share the recordings, via YouTube.

Each soundscape lasts from 30 to 90 minutes. To produce them, the crew walks and drives the art center’s 12,000-acre landscape in search of places to film and record sound. The locations they choose are as varied as the land itself: the upper rim of a vast canyon with a view of the northern edge of the nearly million-acre Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness; an aspen grove—leaves quaking beneath a June sky; a petite spider’s nest spun in the grass. When the crew finds the day’s location, they set up a camera and several microphones, and then they leave, allowing the equipment to document whatever happens next.

“Site Sounds is part documentation, part meditation,” Patten says, “We want to give people a way to hear a brooding Montana thunderstorm, a peaceful stream, a windy canyon…”

From the song of a meadowlark, at first a cappella and then braiding with the rising rush of wind moving through Murphy Canyon, to the chatter of a stream flowing beneath a layer of spring snowfall, each moment at Tippet Rise contrasts with the next. Site Sounds allows us all to experience the rhythms and cycles of life on this expansive landscape, no matter where we are.

Please click on “More info” to visit the Site Sounds page on YouTube.

Photo by Erik Petersen