Jennifer Brookes: The aquarium has been on my mind since this project began..it’s the only place you can (try to) capture the mystery of the underwater world without risking your life. Recently I read a book titled The Art of Diving in an attempt to counteract my oceanic fears, and it wasn’t until after finishing the book and watching a clip from an underwater BBC time lapse that I finally decided to visit the aquarium with my camera. Standing two inches away from a giant octopus with nothing but a sheet of glass between you doesn’t make the deep sea any less terrifying, but it does feel incredible.

Eric Peterson: Music boxes exist in a weird state between musical instrument and recording. Its components are what are usually put into instruments, but its specific design is to play one tune that’s permanently and physically etched into some surface, like a phonograph. Sometimes I feel a little bad about the gap between the amount of time it takes for me to write and record some of my pieces and the amount of time Jenny puts into some of her pieces. So, to make up for some of that, this week I made a music box. I hope you’ll excuse the way it sounds, it’s the first one I’ve ever built. I won’t go into the details of how here, but you should look at some photos of the process on flickr. Composing for it was new and interesting because it was entirely mathematical. After mapping what note corresponded to each of the 18 tines (it wasn’t chromatic, or even really in a specific key, like I thought it would be), and after etching out guidelines corresponding to each tine and each quarter beat with an awl (some measurements as small as 3/64″), arranging the song was the same as plotting points on a graph. This week is unique in that Jenny was responsible for both the visuals and the audio. You can hear cars as they pass by as she cranked the music box and I held a microphone to it in her Seattle apartment where the music box now resides.