I combined the audio assignments Sound Effects and Poetry Reading, which respectively say:

This is a short and simple assignment. Most everyone uses freesound for various audio assignments, but sometimes, you cannot find quite what you are looking for. This assignment is to upload your own sound or sound effect to freesound, preferably something which is lacking.

and:

Poetry is meant to be read aloud. Select a poem – it can be a personal favorite or one you find randomly – and read it aloud in a way that itself makes it a story. Then at the ending of that poem extend it or connect it to a story — this has to be more than just reading a poem to be a story.

I think they work better together and in the context of a story, since the sound effects can be used to tell a story and the reading of a poem can in and of itself be a sound effect, especially with a very abstract poem like “Aquatic Nocturne” by Sylvia Plath.

It goes like this:

Aquatic Nocturne

deep in liquid
turquoise slivers
of dilute light

quiver in thin streaks
of bright tinfoil
on mobile jet:

pale flounder
waver by
tilting silver:

in the shallows
agile minnows
flicker gilt:

grapeblue mussels
dilate lithe and
pliant valves:

dull lunar globes
of blubous jellyfish
glow milkgreen:

eels twirl
in wily spirals
on elusive tails:

adroir lobsters
amble darkly olive
on shrewd claws:

down where sound
comes blunt and wan
like the bronze tone
of a sunken gong.

As mentioned previously in this post and this other post, I love Sylvia Plath’s dark and intense poetry about subjects like depression and alienation. But I also love some of her more beautiful, gentle poems on subjects such as the children, beekeeping, and the ocean. In particular, this poem uses beautiful language that evokes the sights, sounds, and motion of the marine landscape, which I incorporated into the story, as well as resembling the vivid, sensory, surrealist tone I like to give my writing. The title itself is especially poetic, since a nocturne is a song that praises the nighttime.

To create the work itself, I recorded a number of different sounds