Weapons Grade Porpoise

This week’s HipTrax podcast (on Wired’s GeekDad blog) features my song Weapons Grade Porpoise. The whole episode is worth checking out, it’s just the right length. This week’s theme is instrumental songs by nerds, check it out here.

Weapons Grade Porpoise is one of the instrumental’s off of my new album Me Geek Pretty One Day. One of the things I really like about this particular track is that it was one of the first instrumentals I wrote that sort of tells a story. Of course I never expected anyone to figure out the story, so I thought I’d just quickly lay it out for anyone interested.

Basically, the song is about a group of dolphins that have been trained by the US military to be living weapons. Believe it or not, it’s actually based on a true story! I remember hearing this story on an NPR segment 5 years ago, and it blew me away. I seem to recall a naval officer describing the project by using the exact phrase “weapons grade porpoise”. The drums at the beginning of the song replicate a military drum march right before the dolphins go on a mission. Then the drums kick in, as the dolphins go into action mode…. imagine them swimming around in enemy territory, past submarines, through coral reefs and underneath warships. I like to imagine them with that black face paint under their eyes, if that helps. When the chorus comes in, you here the dolphins talking to each other, maybe barking orders.

So that’s the nature of the song, on to the skeleton; the song was created mostly from samples of a circuit bent Techplex 2000, a device so rare, that I can’t even find any mention of it on Google.