Cai Gwilym Pritchard

For this first half of the collaboration module I have to say I’ve found, overall, working with the MA students to be really smooth, at the beginning I had a sort of fear that I wouldn’t be able to meet their expectations but after meeting them and clearing up exactly what they needed from me I was definitely more relaxed throughout the process.

One major help was the sound document they provided to us which provided elements of the script we’d be doing sound to as well as the kind of feeling they wanted out of the score, which I personally found very helpful as it game me a scale by which to compare my own work as well being categorized between artistic, informational, environmental, and voiceover which more or less provided me with a basis for what to approach and in what order, with the artistic (which in my case was the score) coming first as it was my least confident skillset and environmental being my strongest skillset I left it a bit later.

The official mid term crit overall was useful more to see where my peers were at in terms of their own parts of the project, the nature of ours means that each of the scenes we do are totally separate and there isn’t really a whole lot of opportunity to see what they’re up to so it was interesting to hear Raul’s side of the project with the vapourwave score for the ‘trippyscope’ scene. I also appreciated the comment that it was good that we tried to make music even though it was not our skillset, it kind of made the frustration of trying to make a song with little to no understanding of

The one piece of feedback I’ve been thinking a lot about is one I received from Ingrid in a tutorial that more or less ended up being 1-1 as the other members of my group were absent, the feedback was that in our own version of the project I should record my own forest ambiences for the winter wonderland scene. I think my current plan is to take a visit to knole and find a central point as far from the roads as possible and sit and record for 10+ minutes. I’ve got a zoom h4n and a shotgun mic so I think I won’t need to rent anything from the ORB.

In looking for articles about the Eisteddfods place in the history of the welsh language and culture I came across this article on walesonline.co.uk a welsh news publication. The provenance of this article is perhaps not the most appropriate in an academic context but I feel it provides a good sense of the welsh attitude to the Eisteddfods place in welsh culture from the welsh people themselves. It does aim to provide a decently balanced approach to the festival but overall looks on it with a positive light.

It pretty well points out the place it has and how it helps solidify welsh culture and language in the modern era. It doesn’t provide any sources or figures for this which is something I would quite like to find in order to give a more factual/statistical angle to the points I’ll be making in my essay but ultimately its very difficult to measure the security and strength of a language and there are many ways to approach this. It also becomes even harder to pin this to the eisteddfod specifically and so I feel the best thing I can really expect is the word of mouth from the people themselves. I count myself among the welsh people but i am certainly not as in touch with wales as I could be and so articles like this are very helpful in giving a solid source for the kind of thing I want to talk about.

I offered my services to the VR MA students today to help them record lines for the VR project. I brought in my usb mic so I could just record straight into my laptop and edit immediately. We went through the menu lines and the lines for the penguin main character in the ‘Winter Wonderland’ scene. I also ended up recording some lines myself for the ‘Zenrapy’ scene as well.

On taking the recording home and editing I applied some moderate EQ and compression and separated the lines into scenes and labelled them according to what scene they were in, what order the line appeared in, and then a few words at the start to make it easier to find in a long list.

I was asked to do some editing to the penguin voice lines to make it more like a penguin but over the years of doing my own editing and directing for voice actors I’ve found that much of the effect has to come from the VA and unless you’re in specific circumstances you can only do so much with post processing and so in the moment I suggested a slightly higher and energetic tone for the VA to try with the penguin which I feel will convey well, especially when actually coming from the mouth of an animated penguin, any other pitching up would become distracting and so, in this case, less is more.

One of the sound effects I was tasked with creating was the sounds of the portals as you go through. I took the aesthetic of snow and ice quite literally and used a few recordings of ice being broken and cracking, as well as sounds of crushing glass. I also made a bed of inorganic/magical sound using some No-input mixing I did, trying to get a more high end feel to it as that’s what I generally associate with cold: sharp and clear feelings. After some manipulation (reversing, stereo widening, pitching up and down at various points I got something I was happy with overall.

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.

One of the notes on my original score was that there needed to be a playful tone to it. I decided that due to my lack of musical talent I would have to rely on premade samples, I don’t particularly want to pursue becoming a musician as I am more than happy to stick to doing more abstract pieces when required. Here I used the bassoon and xylophone over deep strings with a filter put over them. This has a nice orchestral feel but still feels very basic, I don’t have any experience in composing in this fashion and so I’m not sure how to bring in my skills and experience to make it more interesting, overall it might just have to be more trial and error

I met with the team for the first time on Friday and got some good notes down. It was very useful to get an actual look at the game instead of working off conceptual slideshows and sketches. In taking an actual look at the scene I’m doing the sound for, there is a lot more sound needed than was put in the sound document. I have, now, a list of sounds I need to put together that will begin to work through, the musical/score elements are something I will need to work most on as I am not a musician and so it will require a lot of trial and error.

Overall I’m not massively worried about the sound effects, the most challenging sounds will be the sounds of the northern lights and the portals, everything else will be Foley and layered field recordings. I think I’ll do the action sfx and foley first and finish with the atmos as that is what I’m most comfortable with and so will most likely need the least attention.

For my overall essay I’m currently leaning towards talking about oral storytelling traditions with a slight focus on welsh traditions and its strengthening of the use of welsh and welsh communities in general and how this could be compared to the modern audio drama movement and it’s strengthening of queer stories.

I went through a few sources for this, specifically looking for sources on oral traditions in wales. One I found was ‘The Recording of Oral Tradition in Wales’ by Vincent H. Philips. It talks about the study of Folk life and the history of recording Welsh folklore. It is overall an interesting read, it definitely puts the study of oral traditions into a perspective that I think will come in handy when it actually comes to writing the essay. One quote that stuck out to me was:

“The older folk of our communities are our best source of information. They have witnessed those customs we are investigating, used those very implements we see in the museum, and taken part in those processes which we are trying to place in proper perspective”

I think this very effectively encapsulates the soul of oral traditions, stories are passed down from elders who experienced the subjects of these stories, who know the sources of certain facets of culture and how they interact with a story or poem, the hermeneutic approach comes naturally as the story was originally told by someone who experienced that social/cultural environment. The source overall feels extremely useful, it really gets down to what is interesting and unique about oral traditions and talks about methods and philosophies around recording them, which I think will link really well to the topic of modern audio drama which is intended to be recorded from the beginning and does not mutate and evolve over the course of generations.

I was given a few songs on free music archive which I used as my basis for this track, a lot of them were not super score-y and were also generally beyond my skill to create. I am, ultimately, not a musician and much of the most ‘musical’ pieces I make are done so with a lot of help from generative processes or midi samples which I then mess around with. In the case of this track I placed the random function on a 35% chance of playing something different from the note I input and made it play within the major pentatonic scale, the overall intended tone is a positive sense of letting go, and so it felt like it had the best sound for the job. The rest was just an improvisation I went for. What I did record felt a bit too fast for the tone and so I slowed it right down, having a reverb with a long tail end on top of this helped to create an ambient sort of feel to the whole thing. I also played some very basic Cello draws underneath to fill out the mix a bit.

I think overall it needs something more active. Whenever I try and add anything though it either turns the whole track into something quite creepy or just doesn’t match it at all, I will see what the MA students think and maybe ask some of my class mates in my group what they think.