- Using field recordings and turning it into music but “not quite fully”
- Voice is everything that you are, cant be faked
- Use of the voice
Such a long time I’ve been very interested in the voice as an instrument although, perhaps, instrument isn’t the right word. In what I do do there are three main elements you get the ambulance. So for example in my latest episode there’s the sound of a city on fire, you get the action sound effects (so like someone picking something up or standing or loading a gun), and then you have dialogue, and dialogue is kind of different because you need to have very specific things done by very specific people; you can’t get dialogue from freesound, you can use generic sound effects because it’s more or less the same but each voice is unique and each thing that they’re saying is unique they can’t be treated in the same way because otherwise the story cannot progress and can’t be told. In audio drama The Voice is the character. You don’t get the visuals, you don’t get the body and the articulation, you have to have a very specific voice and it has to be the main thing that someone experiences. And that’s true of everyday life as well: our voice is our character. It tell us where we come from, what we’ve lived through, how we’re feeling. It’s a massive indicator for a lot of things about a person either in that moment or just about their life and so working with voice you really can represent people and utilise people’s voices as a way (or as a medium) to say something about them or about people in general. I think I found it appropriate for this text that you’re reading now to use speech to text so I’m using the Google Docs speech to text function. I’m going to go back and edit and make sure it’s writing the words that I’ve said but it’s important that you see that the way I type is different from the way I speak because I’m sort of improvising as I go along, I say little things here and there and I think that’s very interesting. I think that someone’s voice on a page is different to the voice in reality and this may seem incredibly rambly and I’m still gonna post it. I might look back on this later and realise I sound like a complete idiot. I guess you can treat this like a stream of consciousness it’s my thoughts on The Voice. I’d like to learn and read more about the voice. I’m very excited to listen to AGF talk about voice because I think there is something I’m not quite grasping. I can understand that there is something missing and I’m excited to figure it out.
Creating a reponse
I watched an interview with AGF and she mentioned something called sing n paint and so I downloaded the app. It’s quite old and the sound quality is not fantastic (I think just because of its age) but you essentially paint and it records as you’re painting. So I fed that sounds of me reading a poem into my computer and used a sampler with some various pre-loaded sound effects to create a sort of underlying drone and then laid them on top of eachother. I messed with the panning so it was a bit more dynamic and interesting to listen to. I think overall it came out quite nicely you can definitely hear that it is a voice as being messed with there is a certain tone and a very strong clarity that it is definitely a voice, it’s cool but also slightly haunting