For a while now I’ve had this idea of doing what I’ve taken to calling a “sound breakdown”. Essentially I want to take a piece and start off with regular sound design (ambience, action sound effects, etc.) to the best of my ability, and then gradually transition into vocal impressions of the sounds that would be playing (someone imitating a bird call, blowing into the mic to recreate wind) acapella sound design if you will. I want to then reduce it even further until it’s just someone saying “wind” or “bird call”, essentially reading the sound notations off of the script. It comes off as potentially quite humorous, there is a certain ridiculousness to having a serious scene permeated by the sound designer imitating a creaky house. However that’s not to say that this ‘acapella sound design’ can only be done in a comedic way. Take, for example, “the wind rises” The sound effects are done vocally
“trains, airplane engines and the like — done by mouths, not machines. “Originally Miyazaki wanted to have all the sound effects voiced, and he wanted to do them himself,” said Wexler. “They said ‘No, we need you to draw the film.”
Pond, S. (2013). “The Wind Rises” Director Hayao Miyazaki Goes Out in a Blaze of Controversy – and Beauty. [online] TheWrap. Available at: https://www.thewrap.com/oscarwrap-miyazaki-goes-blaze-controversy/ [Accessed 31 Jan. 2021].
This in no way devalues the emotional depth and message of this film, the main character sees planes as “beautiful dreams”, and so as he carries his love of planes from his dreams the sounds done by Koji Kasamatsu help only to emphasise this quality, it’s beautiful and only furthers the poignant moments of the film. This method of sound is not unique or original but I feel it is certainly undervalued. I found the acapella sound design process to be a lot more performative, (something which I have seeked out for a long time) I was moving in time, along with the other elements and voice actors, it felt almost like a non physical foley, the only analogy I could think of would be that of a choir, multiple elements all coming together to form a unified picture. It’s beautiful and I would love to explore it as a method in different contexts
Live streaming from my phone has become a newfound joy of mine, in class we were introduced to the Locus Sonus app and associated soundmap and I feel like I’ve found an incredible newfound hobby. For such a long time I’ve been very interested in art and technology that is accessible to almost anyone, when I was younger I was fascinated by things like CB radios and telescopes, while they may seem unconnected I feel that they are both about extending your reach, with a telescope you can see things much further way, it extends the usual human eyesight, with the CB radio it allows you to hear and speak to people miles away, extending the distance the human ear can comprehend words and extending ones own voice further than it can normally be carried. Art for me is about making a mark, about extending beyond ones own limits, and the easiest most accessible way to do this is always the most exciting to me, (see my post about Darsha Hewitt’s Disco LED Hack). I could never afford a CB radio, and I only ever got a telescope because a neighbor was moving out and gifted it to me, so things like the Locus Sonus sound project is extremely exciting for me, all it requires is a phone and computer (something which many people have in the modern age) and you can tell the world what you hear in your daily life, if you like you can talk or do some kind of performance, but your reach is extended on a global scale.
I want to explore this particular project further and on the Locus website I noticed that there is an option to stream from a raspberry pi, and so now a new project I’m very interested in trying out is setting up my usb mic and my raspberry pi 1.0 I’ve had since I was 15 or so to stream onto the Locus soundmap. It’s been gathering dust and for a long time I was desperately thinking of a way I could use it in some art piece and then this came along and now I feel like a 24/7 (at least until I need my mic) stream would be a fantastic use.
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
Veils my response to AGF
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
One of the things I often think about is how sound art and (more specifically to my own work) sound design can be done in a performative context, of course with things like music it is a long and storied tradition dating back as far as history can be recorded. But for something that an artist might not call ‘music’ it’s slightly different. I have seen it done extremely well in the form of a play, it was paper cinema’s rendition of Macbeth, it was done with paper characters that were manipulated live, however the most amazing part of it for me was the live foley, from musical stings to horses trotting on gravel there was a whole secondary performance going on which I found myself watching more than the actual play itself. Now of course this piece is much less narrative based but it is still a performance of sorts, I would love nothing more than to witness something like this in person. The beauty is that with something as uncontrollable as flame the sound would be totally different, the strings would snap and the wood would warp in a distinct way.
I find Yosuke Yamashita’s piano burning to be much more of a spectacle. Whilst Lockwood’s is more reserved and feels almost ritualistic, Yamashita’s performance is, well, far more performative, you can see him struggle against the flames, the songs changes as the piano begins to burn and only certain keys still play and the sounds of the flames join the composition, there is a very exciting activity to this one which I feel makes it a lot more captivating to listen to.
For sonic doing and thinking I read an extract from Arnheim Rudolphs “Radio”, and I must say how incredibly gratifying it is to be reading about what it is that you have been waiting so long to learn about and to develop your skills around. It’s not that it has opened up my eyes to entirely new thoughts (though in some aspects it has done that) but it has solidified thoughts I’ve had about my medium and explored them in ways I hadn’t fully considered.
Take, for example, the intention of doing sound editing for audio dramas. Radio brings up the question of if in a broadcast the sound should be supplementing the “missing visual image,” or if it should exist on it’s own and that we as sound designers should not encourage the listener to see with their “inner eye” as it is “a great hinderance to a real appreciation of the real nature of wireless,”. I have often considered this when doing Chain of Being, it takes an audiobook style, and so do I do every sound that happens in a scene? every clink of very glass and all minor details? I began considering doing only what was key, only what was significant, zips and rustles were not necessary. However recently I have indeed tried to encourage the imaginations of my listeners images and scenes and ‘visuals’. To what degree of success you would have to hear for yourself. Doing Chain of Being in the audio medium does have it’s merits, yes, but I always feel like it could very easily be supplemented by visuals, in the distant future I would like to work with various animators and artists to do such a thing, but I also feel that if I were to defend my opinions and decisions to Arnheim I would point out that, the sound does work on it’s own, it is not made as if it had been pulled from a visual element but instead, the visual element would only emphasise the sound, I have always made Chain of Being with sound in mind, and so I do not think, in any way, that it would be cheapened somehow by the addition of visuals, or that it does not fully appreciate the medium in which it exists if it encourages the listeners use of their imaginations.
“I think when I first learned that the sounds of the animals in nature documentaries were not real, or, rather, were at least done in post it was less of a surprised amazement, but was more of a “oh of course!”. Even with the knowledge that most sound effects aren’t actually recorded on set in fiction films, for some reason (I suppose due to the non-fiction nature) you don’t expect to be tricked by something like a documentary It is supposed to be so truthful you end up treating it like CCTV footage, or something out of a case file. But ultimately it’s still telling a narrative, especially with things like Blue Planet II, you tend to follow a singular ‘character’ whose story is told and so in many ways these kinds of documentaries are quite similar to fiction in that the footage that is recorded is edited together, and the sound and foley are done in such a way as to seem exciting and entertaining, yes these are meant to inform but they are also meant to entertain. It’s all about providing a satisfying experience for the audience, just having the sound from on set would be underwhelming as compared to the majesty of nature and so certain tricks have to be played as not to disappoint the audience. “
Over the weekend from the 12th to the 14th I worked as a sound recordist for a documentary about non-binary people with a student from LCF, each day we visited a different person and talked about their journey of self discovery, what their daily lives are like and what it is like to be non-binary. For the production I rented out some equipment from the ORB at LCC, this included a sound kit (zoom h4n, rode ntg 2 etc.), a sennheiser radio mic kit, and a boom pole. After the first day I found that all I really needed was the radio microphone and the zoom h4n, the way the documentary was going to be edited was the only audio would be the interview itself and so I quickly realised there was no need to lug all that equipment around. In working on this project there was certainly a confidence boost however I also found out what I didn’t know, or rather what I needed more experience in. For example, I understood that I didn’t really know what I would need to do when setting levels, or in the editing stage how much noise reduction is appropriate. I suppose this shows my naivete in just assuming all I’d need to do is bring the mics and press record, I wonder though if these things I learn by working with those more experienced than me and just by doing or if I have to be actively taught. The atmosphere was definitely less professional than sets I’d been on before, not that it was unprofessional but because it was two rather inexperienced students it has more of the feeling of mates hanging out (which, in a way, it was) and I imagine that this won’t be what it is like on any future projects but as an introduction to how things might be it wasn’t a terrible start
I am so enthralled by the composition of divided we scroll, the use of traditional strings and synths perfectly encapsulates the relationship between the organic humanity and the artificial, constructed devices we seem to have tethered ourselves to. And the fact that said strings are warped in pitch emphasises that idea of how we are being changed over time. There’s this strong sense of foreboding, from the anxious melody to the deep bassline on the synths, the aforementioned warped strings and glitched/delayed tones, all of these things form a composition that really presents itself as something that should be payed attention to, the subject matter is serious and should be worth considering. I would be interested to know the process behind this composition, both in the nitty gritty technical side of what synth was used, which daw and plugins etc, but also in terms of, what was the development like, was Alexandra given a the footage and brief and then free reign, or (due to its nature as a dance piece) was the composition made before and then the edit was done around that? I wonder if there is a standard way to do this or if it does vary from production to production.
Attempting a Response
In this particular response it turned out to be just an attempt at scoring, having no musical talent/ knowledge I went in with how I wanted it to feel. There was quite a foreboding, grand, slightly ethereal sense to the scoring in Divided we Scroll. Which in shorthand means slow and with reverb, I found a good preset on the Air Hybrid 3 virtual synth, I altered it slightly but overall it had this good slightly mysterious vibe to it. From there I found a 4 note pattern that sounded good and then just looped that a few times, ultimately I ended up just shortening it down to one use of that loop to make room for the next ‘melody’. In this case I used a preexisting orchestral loop which I put through Fracture XT which is a granular glitch processor. The traditional orchestral sound which has been glitched matches the theme and feel of Alexandra’s warped strings quite well I think. Over the back of it all I used a noise maker to create a deep wind which I feel adds more atmosphere to the overall score. Alexandra uses a transition or two to switch between segments and so I made one of my own, using a harsh wind from that noise maker I applied a doppler effect that’s built in to audition and then gave it more thickness with a chorus, vocal synth and a compressor. Overall I think it works quite well, it’s dark and mysterious which was what I was kind of going for. I think I should have shortened the second melody and not the first as that was more interesting to listen to and a lot of that glitchy feel can be quite abrasive after a while.
In asking about the relationship between dance and sound, and if music is essential for dance to be performed Yassmin answered that it is not. First she pointed out that if we watch a video of someone dancing and we were to remove the music, or if we see someone dancing to the music from their headphones we are able to still recognise their movements as dance. And so from the point of view of someone witnessing dance it can exist from the performer. In terms of the experience of the performer Yassmin talked about how the rhythm can easily come within and that music-less dancing has no real limitations in what can work, people can dance together with no music. So what then, is the relationship between dance and music if dance does not intrinsically need music to exist. According to Yassmin the relationship actually works the other way, “music is made to be danced to,” the contrarian within me immediately wanted to say ‘no it’s not’ but I thought I would explore my thoughts here. If we take a scientific approach to a theory such as this, we could try and come up with examples that would disprove this. Immediately my mind went to classical music, which stereotypically is performed in large concert halls to rows and rows of seated audience members, however after a brief bit of research I found that often patrons would commission artists to compose music specifically danced to and often pieces were written with the intention of dance to be performed to them.
What of abstract music? Music that is without rhythm? My mind immediately goes to Jessica Ekomane’s Multivocal, which is many different metronomes that all start at the same time but are all a few milliseconds apart, the timing is constantly shifting and so there is not a consistent rhythm to dance to. In the end though it depends on each persons definition of music, according to oxford learners dictionaries it is
“sounds that are arranged in a way that is pleasant or exciting to listen to. People sing music or play it on instruments.”
Oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com. (2020). music noun – Definition, pictures, pronunciation and usage notes | Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary at OxfordLearnersDictionaries.com. [online] Available at: https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/music [Accessed 5 Dec. 2020].
but ask Throbbing Gristle if they intended their music to be pleasant or exciting to listen to. There is no real consistent definition and it really varies from person to person. For Yassmin it could be that the definition of music is an arrangement of sounds intended to be danced to. For me as a young emerging sound artist I am not so confident and feel like any definition I were to come up with would exclude great swathes of artists and their work. In the end though I do feel it is relative.
I will continue to update this as I go along, the process is slow especially because of university and such but here you will find some explanations as to how I made various sound effects in the latest episode of Chain of Being
In the interests of honesty I will say that I am writing this after having done a few sound effects and editing for this episode the ones I have done are: “party outside from the inside”, “dust storm in a dream”, “4 beats throbbing”, “groan and body horror crack”, and “burning house” the way I will do an episode is I will first write the Script, go through and make notes of where certain sound effects would be appropriate and then create a list and tick off one by one. Some of them I will make separately in audition and then just make them first and then use them later when the time arises but sometimes the ambience will change and in that case it will rely on the timing. I will keep it as the audition session file and then just copy and paste it in afterwards.
Fire suppressant foam:
So one of these sound effects I have to do is the sound of a fire suppressant drone sending some foam into a burning house and for this I kind of struggled a little bit but as a start I went down the route of fire extinguishers and then the sounds of some shaving foam cans (all from freesound.com) I wanted the motion to feel quite cacophonous and rapid so I ended up layering them all together, I had to lower the pitch and up the bass of the shaving foam in order to add an extra level of size to the sound. I then layered everything together like so:
Unfolding a bow:
For this sound I described the bow as a “sleek scoped folding bow” so I decided not to go too overboard with the sound effects in terms of mechanical noises and clicking and that sort of thing. So all I did was get my zoom H1 recorder and went to the door of my room in the accommodation and just recorded myself flicking it and holding down and letting go and doing all these sorts of things and it came out quite nicely and so I decided to only use that and just cut up the different ones I had to do the sound of unlocking on either end and then unfolding automatically, I also added the twang of a longbow that I got from freesound just to place the image of a bow in the listeners mind. I think it came out quite nicely. It’s very simple and the sleekness is really present
Folding a Bow:
It’s very tempting to just reuse the elements from the unfolding and just do them backwards but unfortunately in trying to emulate and semblance of how things would sound I must consider that the sounds would indeed be different, a car door unlocking and locking are two different sounds, a folding chair or any sort of unfolding mechanism has two different sounds for opening and closing and so I went along a similar route of finding some sounds of locks, a small motor noise, and clicking. The motor noise is to signify the winding up of the bow string, as it’s being opened this would not be needed as the force of the actual unfolding would pull it out whereas as the tension is lost there is not force to wind it back in so I decided the sound of a motor would suggest to the listener that this kind of thing is taking place. Overall it is relatively simple to do and just requires a bit of shifting around to get a good sense of motion.
Beep:
One character has a communication device built into the side of her head, she taps it and I had decided that it should make a sound, realistically it wouldn’t, whenever I open my phone it doesn’t beep every time however having this podcast be an exclusively audio medium, I have to emphasise certain elements to paint a stronger image and so in order to place this idea that the character (Lanralis) has this piece of tech built into her head. I always have trouble doing UI and tech beeps and so this was a bit of a struggle, I decided to go an entirely different route this time and instead of generating a tone in audition or trying to tailor a synth plugin I would try and take a sound recording and manipulate it into the kind of thing I want. The character in question is a Veatorian, one of the motifs I have in mind for the veatorians is fabrics, cloths and tapestries, so as my initial base I took the sound of a cloth belt being put on. I then upped the pitch, in order to make it have more of a beeping quality, having it too low makes it sound too natural and also often UI noises that are too sudden/harsh and deep show that something has been done wrong, and the intention here was to do an activation sound. Ultimately the sound overall wasn’t smooth enough to use and so I decided to start from scratch. I have noticed in my admittedly limited experience that I find it much easier to do darker, ominous and negative sounds then I do anything with slightly more positivity, I suppose this is what I have yet to develop but I find it quite daunting especially when I have no real idea on how to begin
