Bicycling Across America Vol. 2

Featured story

The sounds of America from Maine to Oregon, captured by bike

In the summer of 2021, producer Charles Van Kirk rode his bicycle 3,900 miles across the US from the Atlantic coast in Maine to the Pacific Ocean in Oregon. He packed a Zoom H6 in his handlebar bag and recorded sounds over the two-month-long journey through fourteen states.

In Part 2 of this series, we gathered highlights of these recordings for a monumental two-part Splice Explores release. Each pack features hundreds of sounds that make up the diverse and beautiful soundscape of America—sounds from the side of the road like trains crossing the South Dakota prairie and thunderstorms crackling over Iowa cornfields. There are sounds from national parks: bison grunting and geysers erupting in Montana. There are sounds from inside a tent: rivers rushing and coyotes howling in the middle of the night.

In addition to natural mixes of the field recordings, this pack includes expertly crafted musical loops made with instruments derived from the source material. Charles used Sensory Percussion sensors to perform grooves on his drum set with these custom instruments to create otherworldly rhythms and one-of-a-kind layers. The resulting loops are full of texture and tone unique to these sample packs. Dive into this pack and explore the truly vast palette of sounds that America has to offer.

Companion Packs

The American West

This pack explores the sounds of the American's most iconic and natural geography, including the big walls and waterfalls of Yosemite, as well as an abandoned mine in the most r...

Lithophones

In Fantasy Canyon of Dinosaur National Monument Park along the Uinta Mountains of Utah on the border of Colorado lie some of the worlds only lithophones. These ancient stones...

Geothermal Energy

The molten core of the earth is often referred to as the sun beneath our feet. 4,000 miles down the temperatures can reach the same as those found on the surface of the sun. ...

Desert Percussion

Dry sands, hot rocks, prickly cacti, and wind swept mountains make up the harsh yet beautiful landscape of American deserts. A seemingly quiet and solitary environment, the d...

Antelope Island

Antelope Island, the largest island in the Great Salt Lake, is one of the crown jewels of Utah’s state park system. The uninhabited 42-square-mile desert island is renowned f...

Bicycling Across America Vol. 1

In the summer of 2021, producer Charles Van Kirk rode his bicycle 3,900 miles across the USA from the Atlantic coast in Maine to the Pacific Ocean in Oregon. He packed a Zoom...

South India

Field recorders in hand, musicians, producers, and sound artists Krishna Jhaveri and Sanaya Ardeshir (aka Sandunes) spent 30 days traveling through South India to capture the...

Natural Reverbs

Splice Explores: Natural Reverbs is based on the idea of music responding to nature. Producer Charles Van Kirk collaborating with musician Julia Easterlin visited three disti...

Water Rhythms

Water Rhythms is a hybrid sound pack of water and drums created by Susie Ibarra (composer, percussionist, sound artist) and recorded with sound engineers Jake Landau and Eli ...

The Himalayas

Renowned experimental percussionist, Susie Ibarra traveled to the Himalayas in Sikkim, India to capture water percussion with hydro-phonic microphones, as well as bamboo one-sho...

Iceland

As a special Explores project to recognize Earth Day, Charles Van Kirk & Splice's Josh Robertson visited Iceland's Vatnajökull Glacier and National Park, the largest glacier...

Music Box Village

In 2011, a collapsing Creole cottage on Piety Street in the Bywater became the catalyst for a grand experiment in "musical architecture.” Founding artists Delaney Martin, Tay...

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