One of the more interesting elements of this project to me was the task of creating the sounds of the Northern Lights. This scene takes place at the end of the experience and is meant to give a sense of calm/release and finish off the whole experience. Now of course the challenge of this is that the northern lights don’t make any noise that we can perceive and so I had to take a more abstract approach.
My recent episode of my audio drama Chain of Being required me to do the sounds for a different dimension where reality is slightly off. In this I took the philosophy of creating semi-diegetic sound where it is not made explicitly clear if the sounds are part of an abstract score or the soundscape that the characters are hearing. In that spirit I went with a similar approach and treated this sound effect partially like score and partially like sound design, the result was me constructing a synth path in Vital, I went for a soft resonant tone. as I was constructing it I had videos of the Northern Lights off YouTube playing, this really helped to give me a visual reference as I did not have any videos of the actual VR experience and so I was able to try and capture some spirit of the real thing.