Amie is the co-founder of the podcast network ‘Faustian Nonsense‘ (of which I am a member) and a showrunner of upcoming audio drama ‘Jack of All Trades‘. She is a self described “Rebounding ethicist, and a recovering attorney” and does her work with Faustian Nonsense ” for the sake of creating an ethical, thriving, hub of creativity and creators,”
I did my interview with Amie on the 7th of may, back-to-back with the other showrunner of JOAT and co-founder of FN Jaclyn Seelagy. The answer to the last question of the interview has been omitted as there was a discussion involving heavy spoilers for her upcoming Audio Drama. It was a very relaxed experience as I have worked with Amie for a while as a member of Faustian Nonsense, Amie was extremely helpful in this interview, she presented me with a lot of interesting new ideas about Audio Drama as a medium and the community as a whole. One thing that has stuck with me that was very interesting to actually hear put into words was the idea that there is a certain safety in Audio Drama as opposed to mainstream mediums as Amie puts it “If you, say, watched a CW show, [they find out] that the audience is mostly women and mostly queer folk [it] is immediately ignored and often punished,” instead, because there is such a direct move from a queer creators idea to seeing it realised, with very little interference, one can allow themselves to relax and not have to worry about tropes like bury your gays or the like.
After finally having an in person lesson in which to properly explore ableton live with 1:1 assistance I finally felt confident to finally approach it and I must say it’s clear why this program is so popular. Even with the base software instruments and effects there is so much to be done. The first piece of work is a group project we did in which we had one sound we had to create a piece from, I took a contact mic recording and placed it into the simpler on the slice mode, from there (after a few minutes of experimentation) I decided to turn the transposition all the way up on the simpler, it gives this glitchy low-res effect which I found extremely satisfying. From there I followed an example given by Jose where I took the midi of a pre existing song (in this case Giuseppe Verdi – Il Trovatore – Anvil Chorus, a song I’m strangely enthralled by). Using this method of composing with preordained rhythm and progression meant that I didn’t have to worry so much about writing the music itself and could instead focus on tailoring the sound to make it so I was as happy with it as possible. I also layered the track over itself, one with the transposition all the way up and one all the way down to best cover both bass treble and mid. After a few minor tweaks and changing the BPM I was left with the following:
An extract from a 7 min piece
Intrigued by this glitchy effect that came from turning the transposition all the way up, I plugged my girlfriends bass guitar into my zoom h4n and recorded a few twangs and manipulations. With this recording, I placed it into the simpler and turned up the transposition and got an interesting glitch effect. However I felt that it wasn’t quite enough. I had previously heard of the legendary “OTT” compressor preset in Ableton and decided to push it to it’s limit by putting nearly every setting on high and doubling it up. What I got was a really interesting look into the usually unheard parts of a guitar string, because the compressor took everything and brought it into a more audible range there were so many things that I had no idea I was hearing, combined with the glitchy transposition the whole thing was very satisfying to me. It really played to my interest in hearing beyond ones usual capacity that I developed during the radio module. Overall I am very happy with the result:
“When I look back at those days I have no doubt that Providence guided us, not only across those snow fields, but across the storm-white sea that separated Elephant Island from our landing place on South Georgia. I know that during that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia it seemed to me often that we were four, not three. I said nothing to my companions on the point, but afterwards Worsley said to me, “Boss, I had a curious feeling on the march that there was another person with us.” Crean confessed to the same idea. One feels “the dearth of human words, the roughness of mortal speech” in trying to describe things intangible, but a record of our journeys would be incomplete without a reference to a subject very near to our hearts.”
Ernest Shackleton, South
“Who is the third who walks always beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together. But when I look ahead up the white road, there is always another one walking beside you”
I am very intrigued by Shackletons writing, it is part of his larger writings about his experiences in Antarctica which are a pretty standard account, with very little supposition and paranormal events. This passage is at the end of chapter 10 and feels almost tacked on, as if Shackleton was reluctant to admit it, but was driven to mention it due to it’s importance.
I don’t want people to think of me creating this, I want this piece to exist as if fully formed, with no human touch, in the same way I hope for immersion into my audio drama, I want the world created by the fourth man to absorb the listener. I think there are a few approaches to this, I could go the realism route and attempt to create a sense of space and realistic sound, perhaps going into the world of binaural sound, doing what foley and recording I can using the binaural mic at University, this would be a difficult task, if just one thing is slightly off the entire sense of immersion is ruined, but if done well I would have the listener in my hand, with total freedom to guide their emotions. It would also aid my podcast sound design, giving me practice in creating totally immersive soundscapes. Another approach would be a slightly more abstract method. I definitely want to create a sense of real space, but to have non-diegetic soundscapes to aid the listener in feeling this sense of a “fourth man”.
I think I’ll give both a go, but ultimately I’ll take the middle route, designing a sense of space with what can be called a ‘score’ to emphasise certain elements. Whilst ‘shadow in the purple’ was entirely score and sound scapes, with nothing that can be fully identified. I will go the way of my audio drama and allow this element to take a lesser role.
List of things I would like to incorporate/experiment with:
Voice
Creative use of sidechain compression
Binaural recordings
Binaural recordings
Creation of space with minimal ambience
Sound sources with significant provenance
In reading about this ‘Third Man factor’ I found that lots of the interpretations of this extra presence were as a benevolent spirit or guardian angel of some kind. Very few seemed to identify it as something neutral or indeed malicious, perhaps influenced by my experiences with the shadow or the leviathan in ‘the shadow in the purple’ I find this ‘fourth man’ to be something not so kind, my initial impressions was that it was a rather unsettling if not outright scary, this unwelcomed unexpected visitor is undeniably creepy, paired with the setting of a vast wilderness from which there is no escape.
Upon listening to falaise by floating points and it’s slightly jittery strings, I was completely enthralled by this repeated cutting out, something about it was so unique and present, the whole song is very powerful and really stirs up the emotions of the listener. At first I had thought it was some kind of tremolo but upon listening further and making my own attempts with some tremolo:
I found that there wasn’t as much of this jittery effect, the cuts were too smooth and felt more like it was spinning. I asked my partner who does music and she thought it sounded a lot like sidechain compression. After doing some further research we had found it. From there I did a few tutorials and figured out a way to actually do this, by layering a sound that has a repeating sound (something with heavy tremolo on or a quickly repeating sample) putting it on mute and sending the side chain of the sound I wanted to jitter you would be able to recreate this effect pretty closely, but after taking this sound and reversing it you got the effect exactly, as the attack was very low giving it a stronger jitter.
The stuttering base I used for this was an uneven, constantly changing one made with the granular synthesis module in Cecilia, I think this gives it a much more natural sounding feel, despite being something not found in nature weirdly enough, I really enjoy this effect and would love to use it creatively, perhaps for a soundscape in Chain of Being. It has this very hypnotic effect, this slightly changing repetition. I did it once more and formed it with my other attempts into a piece of some kind:
“I grow and grow and grow almost too fast for my skin and muscle and flesh to keep up, my hands extend beyond me, and for half a second they almost don’t feel like my own, as if I had outgrown the flesh and bone my soul is contained within, I am soon able to leap up higher than could previously be imagined, and fall down faster than ever before, everything I do is done so with a newfound haste that is so incredibly refreshing, I live now in total ecstasy, the ability to enact my will with lightning speed finally allows me to feel free.”
Looking back at this exercise it’s interesting how similar a form it has to ‘The Shadow in the Purple’ a text punctuated by sound that doesn’t necessarily match the sound source directly but instead acts as a loose interpretation, an impression of what it is, as abstract art often represents complex emotion unpresentable by language.
When the group had decided on colour (fully with my support, I in know way mean to suggest I didn’t have my part in deciding this) I was initially at a loss as to how to approach the stimulus. I had considered going the route that Steve suggested and ended up going with by using frequencies that correspond to specific frequencies of colours, however I felt that, given I was unhappy with the previous projects outcome, I should attempt to use speech in some form and approach it like an audio drama.
Simultaneously I was also coming to terms with a recent LSD trip. Unsurprisingly it was a very strange experience that required a lot of time to process, I’m still processing it I think. One of the things that came up during the trip was this idea of shadows in a purple light, it didn’t take long before I could both achieve some kind of catharsis and create a work for my studies. My approach to audio drama is:
write>note sounds needed>cast>edit lines and create sound effects> pull everything in to one edit
This time around though I felt there was a sense of urgency to getting the actual words recorded, the memory of the trip was, like a dream, fading fast and so I recorded the account first, later editing out the ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ both for ease of listening and also to keep the piece within the 5 minute time constraint. I then, in audition, set markers where I felt certain sounds would be appropriate. This way of doing things was much easier, and I would love to use it in my usual practice, however the sheer number of sound effects needed makes this impractical. I then went through my, as mentioned in a previous blog post, wide array of sounds from previous experiments, there was a few ended up having to design myself as my experiments didn’t fully ‘fit the bill’ so to speak.
Once I had the constant drones, ambiences and sound effects it was a relatively simple process of making sure everything came in and left, faded in and out and was balanced to a degree that I was happy with. There were a few things I considered changing, for example having my words heard perfectly clearly throughout, but I felt that, in order to emulate the overwhelming nature of the trip, there needed to be elements which were heard to parse. I also briefly thought about taking out my words all together and just having the story be vague and unguided by my words, but at the behest of my audio drama colleagues I left it in. I wonder though, had I asked someone who wasn’t based in the same sound culture as me, if I would have received the same response.
I had a few influences (direct and otherwise) in this project, to list a few:
The sampling techniques, spatial elements and what I cant describe further than the ‘vibe’ of Matmos in their album, ‘plastic anniversary’
The use of strange noises and slightly foreign and alien nature used by Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury in the track ‘Alien’ from Annihilation 2018)
The track ‘Bias’ by Floating Points, with it simple but also quite detailed consistent rhytm
The work of Reggie Watts, while not directly influencing this piece, it helped to explore possibilities of using voice and loops to create a more rhythmic and human feeling piece, ultimately something I decided didn’t feel appropriate
Overall I feel the piece fits nicely with the others, we all were in some way influenced by colour and the way it exists in our lives, I took on the task of ordering the pieces for this album we were presenting, I felt that one way to approach it would be to order it based on colour gradients a sa start and then swapping things around to make sure it flowed nicely. The group felt that i would be good to alternate, spoken and non-spoken pieces for a better flow and Buki felt that her piece should go last, which made sense to me as it would act as a way for the listener to wind down after what is ostensibly a rollercoaster of emotions ,meaning the listening order would be:
Thanks to the content of the creative sound project module I’ve been looking more and more into using sampling in my pieces, I’ve always been more interested into the Musique concrète side of sound art, I find the use of real world sounds which are then manipulated into something else to be a very creatively fulfilling process, it forms the basis of my approach to sound design, I find that, since the release of star wars, the use of synthesizers for every vaguely technological device (phasers and transporters in star trek) has this intensely artificial feel and I think much more can be achieved with a lot less effort. In beginning my journey into doing sound art I have found that I tend not to create for the purposes of conjuring up an image in a listener’s head, or emulating what one would expect something to sound like, but instead doing sounds for their own sake, to be listened to for themselves. In light of this I have taken to doing radio sweeps
on my little solar powered radio and keeping them for use as a sound source for later manipulation. It’s a rather simple but very therapeutic process you need to do is switch on your radio and slowly go through the frequencies from one end to the other, occasionally stopping on some interesting samples and different kinds of static, here’s the latest one I recorded:
radio sweep taken on 09/04/21
Once I have that I will put it into a sampler/granular synthesiser I love to use called Palindrome, it has four sections which it cycles through in a pattern that is entirely customisable to the user, each sound can have effects placed on it that are also highly customisable, I tend to randomise everything, as it allows me to focus on listening to the sounds themselves and not get bogged down in tweaking, I allow fate to decide. In each of the sections I place the recently recorded radio sweep and allow Palindrome to select where in the 2-5 minute sweep it will take the grains for the granular parts of the program. Because the Radio is a mix of speaking, music, and static, there is a wide range of different sounds that can be achieved, strange morphed speech, strangely musical loops and entirely bizarre sound effects, the following are some samples that I managed to get from feeding the sweep through palindrome:
I think there are many uses for these sounds, steps forward perhaps. There are a few, some I feel can be edited together and used for the purposes of sound effects, sounds of energy weapons and monsters and such. Others can be cut up even further to be put in drum pads and samplers for music production. Some can be edited to make part of a layer in a soundscape, put through a paulstretch or some other form of processing or used as is.
For my own uses I think I’ll give all three a go, perhaps sticking to my roots and leaning more into the sound effects side of things, listening out for potential, using the amazing customisation features on the plugin to reduce some of the noise that one can find in palindrome and really design the sound.
Do you have a favourite sound, and how often do you hear it?
What does it mean if something is ‘musical’? Is what you create ‘musical’ in any way?
If a tree falls in the forest, and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?
In devising the questions I would be asking my interviewee I felt that in order to try and provoke some more unexpected answers, I should make them as abstract and open ended as possible, allowing for multiple interpretations, in each question I feel there is opportunity to get a wide variety of answers from a wide variety of people. I very much wanted to interview fellow podcast sound designer and friend Kathryn Stanley. I felt that we were different enough that she would give some interesting answers, but also that the more abstract elements of sound wouldn’t go amiss as it would if I asked, say, my grandmother.
Because Katie is based in the U.S. there were a few hurdles to get past. The first being timezones, which was as simple as figuring out when we were awake but also still mentally prepared enough to do an interview. The second was doing the interview over the internet, there was a few ways to go about this, the first was to get on a call (discord, zoom, hangouts etc.) and then record our ends of the convo, doing a countdown to a clap. However having done things like this before, I knew that there was a program called zencastr which records and automatically syncs up the audio, this meant all I had to worry about was the interview itself
I found the interview nice, though I felt I was a bit nervous for some reason, perhaps it was the fact that the pressure was on me, it being my first interview on the asking end of things. I did genuinely enjoy the conversation. I think it’s always nice to sit and talk about the elements of sound with one’s peers, it’s interesting to see different perspectives from one’s own and this is the easiest and most basic way to do it. Listening back I really find myself quite frustrating to listen to. Um-ing and Ah-ing in circles, Katie was very good to put up with it and still gave some really nicely thought out answers despite my dithering. I think if I were to do it again I’d try to get the structure down properly, the delay over the internet didn’t help the flow of conversation and so having a more regimented structure might help develop it. The only issue with that is there isn’t a lot of room for follow up questions and it would not have the same conversational nature that I would like.
In the end I’m glad I had the conversation, I think if I was less nervous and had more time it might be nice to do it again a few times and refine the question. I didn’t have a purpose beyond seeing the thoughts of my peers and I would definitely not go as far as to call it ‘research’ but nevertheless I think I will try this again.
The first time I had heard of Robert Henke, also known as Monolake was when I began to learn about granular synthesis in my creative sound projects module, already I was in love with the process, using the Cecelia 5 module to really experiment and test it’s limits. I found (and do still feel this way) that it was such an advanced and versatile tool, you are able to completely derive sounds from their sources without sacrificing any sense of naturality or character. And so seeing that Robert Henke had developed not one but two granular synthesis based instruments for Ableton live I was amazed, in order to do such a thing it must take a total mastery and understanding of the process. What is surprising to me is that granular synthesis is not a new process and so I was wondering what might come next, what new processes would come to ‘wow’ me in the future?
I took the opportunity to ask Robert himself what he thought the ‘next big thing’ would be. Interestingly, he brought up the idea of the power of AI. I have definitely felt that machine learning could help with things like noise reduction and repair of audio but Robert brought up the point that it could do wonders for cataloguing and searching for sounds when composing. Robert’s vision was of a cloud of sounds that one could select from, each one similar to the other, this would allow for a wider range of textures used without sacrificing the soul and atmosphere of a piece. I think this would also provide a really useful avenue for sound design to go down, taking small fragments of sounds that one may not find so readily in their hard drive that sound similar to a preselected file would solve the problem of finding a sound that’s good-but-not-quite-right, in layering a sound one would be able to have a much wider plethora of options to really fine tune the effect.
