So it had snowed around Thanksgiving and then that snow melted and it remained cold up high, up high in elevation,

but the roads opened over the high passes and the ice, the lakes were not buried in snow, so the ice was bare.

And I had a friend who was working in Yosemite at the time and she called me up.

She was like, you've got to come up and record these lakes.

This is Cheryl Leonard, a sound artist from California.

You're hearing a composition she made with recordings of Lake Ice and Yosemite. Okay, I got there around dawn.

I have the sounds in the morning of the

it's like the lake waking up really.

Do you know what's the process that's creating each of those sounds?

I know in general it has to do with the ice expanding and contracting

if it's warming or cooling.

So more sounds happen in the morning and the evening

as the temperature's changing dramatically.

And as the ice, it's literally like getting smaller or getting larger and it's stuck in a spot so it flexes and it buckles and then it cracks and those actions create vibrations or sounds and then that sound

travels across the surface of the lake, the frozen lake.

It's like a giant drum membrane.

So as the sound travels across that membrane

through the ice, the high frequencies go faster and the low frequencies are slower.

So the highs hit your ear first and the lows hit your ear later, so you hear this sort of glissando from the highs to the lows, like

dew, doo, doo.

Which most people recognize is like the Star Wars blaster sound.

So when... So whenever you're on a lake that's making these sounds,

...