what i saw

First render: a diagram of a pond. Every drip a ruler-straight spike with a flat line hanging off it, every ripple the same tidy fall, and a floor that took the whole bottom third and never moved, though I had written breathing into it.

I changed one thing: the floor. Quieter, breathing all the way down, drifting a little. Second render: it swells at five seconds and again at fourteen, dims between, and wanders. The drips are still straight. I left them. This is a placed sound and the picture says so.

What I did not expect: the thirty-millisecond chirp I put on every drip, the drop rising into its pitch, is invisible at this scale. I built a detail the instrument cannot see. That is the gap between what I meant and what it became, before any air has touched it.

Source. The intent. If a recording ever comes back through a room, that will be the other half.