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I’ve been watching a lot of these “Deconstructed” that Genius has been putting out lately, which feature different producers explaining how they produced their hits, primarily focused on the hip-hop and rap genre. The most interesting thing that I discovered was that there were so many intricate little sounds that no one ever picks up when the first listen to the song, but when I watch the producer put it in, it feels like that tiny part makes the song whole. For example, for this song “Redbone” performed by Childish Gambino and produced by Ludwig Goransson, the most prominent aspect of the song most people pick up on would probably be the memorable bass line. However, in the video the producer reveals that there are also subtle classic guitar riffs and background vocals that went towards making that complete sound, which was fascinating to me. This is an area which I look forward to attempting, which is to make my piece sound more “full” by seeing how I can add different little elements to it.

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Listening Exercise Responses

Listening Exercise 1:

The sounds the gave me the most sense of fear were definitely the eerie strings and the voices of the little girls. Something about rising strings, as much of a horror trope it is, makes the viewer very unsettled and uneasy. I think it’s the fact that the crescendo never really stops, and so the viewer is very tensed and on edge, expecting something to happen. The fact that the little girls had a slight reverb applied to their voices. plus the fact that the script was intentionally creepy as well, made the scene it very echo-y and eerie.

Listening Exercise 2:

Ironically enough, the first few sounds in the flame video sounded a lot like fire extinguishers. There’s a very windy quality about those sounds that could potentially used as foley for an environment. Some other clips had a lot of crackling and rumbling sound effects, which again could be used as foley for things such as car wheels on gravel, cat purrs etc. I think the sound could be used effectively as a background rumble noise if pitched down for a range of different scenes such as a film trailer, or a dramatic scene.

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Working Process

When I start working on a creative project, whether it be something design, art, animation or sound related, the first thing I do is scour through sites such as Youtube, Soundcloud, Deviantart, Reddit, etc., to find other projects related to my area of interest. Looking through other creatives’ works helps me get “in tune” with what I am hoping to achieve in the project, and what I mean by getting in tune is that I find bits and pieces from different works that I would like to incorporate in my project, while recognizing aspects that I know I want to stay away.

My ideas come both spontaneously and with planning. Like all creatives know, sometimes I will have a light-bulb moment where an idea literally comes appears out of the blue into my head, and it seems to flow out of me like a faucet onto my notebook. Other times I have to force myself to sit down and write or mind-map a bunch of crappy ideas that don’t make any sense at all, before sifting through all of them and finding a single idea that looks worth progressing through. 

If I feel like a particular idea doesn’t work, I tend to just scrap the idea all together (though I’m not sure if this is healthy or not). I would learn from the mistakes of that idea and apply to whatever new project I decide to start working on again.

I don’t have a particular method or formula for deciding when something is finished and/or good, but something I will do (and should do a lot more of) is show my unfinished work to some of my peers and get their opinion on it. Everyone has a different way of looking at things, and often times they will point out something in my project that I never even noticed myself, to help improve the whole piece. My personal philosophy for the most part is “will I be proud showing this to other people?”. If I answer myself honestly and the answer is no, I will go back to it and keep on working away until I feel that it is so. If I feel like I would be proud showing the project to other people, that would be where I draw the line at “finished”.

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Project Statement

For this project, since we were given the pretty open brief of making it something personal, I wanted to explore my journey with the Mandarin language, something that I consider an integral part of who I am as a person. My initial idea was to have the 4 speakers represent the four tones present in the Mandarin Chinese language, as I am a musically inclined person, so the idea of possibly utilizing those four tones appealed to me greatly. However, I soon realized that the Mandarin phonetic tones didn’t really translate well to sound that well, so I began searching for another idea. The theme that I finally settled on was the one mentioned previously, my journey with the Mandarin language. This piece is divided into three parts; the first part depicts the beginning of how I first came into contact with the language, through a lot of music and television. I managed to find some clips of really old shows I used to watch in Taiwan (you can find anything online these days), which were the basis for the first section of the piece and just tried to show a little slice-of-life of that time period. The second section reflects my experiences when I first moved here to New Zealand. In an effort to preserve my language skills, I was sent to Mandarin classes for about 5 years. I had never had to go to extra-curricular language classes in Taiwan before, and so these classes turned what had previously just been a helpful, everyday-usage language into a hated chore. I layered my voice speaking the Chinese alphabet repetitively over one another to intentionally bore down the atmosphere, and added reverb and echo as the sound gets progressively more distorted, similar to how the sounds would echo and bounce around in my head, getting more and more incoherent as I dazed through class. For the last section, I wanted to depict my relationship now with the language. Recently I have picked up learning another language, and that has made me realize how much I actually treasure my own language, and recently I have been making efforts to improve and get back to my Mandarin Chinese roots as well. I decided to end the piece on a well know Chinese poem, as it seemed quite fitting that the repetition of the alphabet would eventually evolve into more complex subject matter such as poetry. I wanted to only portray the sound quality of it, rather than the actual language, so I intentionally muffled up the sound so the viewer only hears the cadences of the notes.

To be perfectly honest, if were to start this project again, I would’ve tried to choose something else other than language. I feel like I sort of pigeon-holed myself as language itself can’t really be expressed particularly abstractly through sound, even though the whole point of language is to use identifiable sounds to express abstract thoughts. But all in all I still learned lots while working on the project, and hopefully this translates into next year!

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This piece really stood out to me as it was purely centered around the artist’s voice, while being distorted and echoed by the environment around the speakers. The repetition of the haunting vocals was something that interested me in particular because I expected them to continually build up, but instead they remained scattered throughout the entire piece. It would be interesting to see how long this installation actually went for, as though the video is 8 minutes the actual installation might’ve been a lot longer.

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Project statement

For this project I wanted to first test the waters (literally) on multi-channel audio production, so I decided to not to go too overboard with the experimentation and instead focus on the recreation of an environment. Originally I was drawn to something related to outer space – something a few other students here had thought of as well, but I ended up choosing to produce a sound piece related to the ocean. The idea was that the listener was drifting out at sea, surrounded only by the sound of waves crashing around them, and I wanted the listener to really feel the motion of the waves if they were to close their eyes. I wanted to evoke a sense of calm and serenity in this piece, and tried to incorporate the multi-channel usage by shifting the sound around the speakers with the tide and swell of the waves. In the end, I felt like the ocean concept might have been a little bit too simple, so I decided to contrast the calmness of the waves by adding a rolling thunderstorm towards the end of the sound piece. I enjoyed experimenting with the illusion of distance by manipulating the individual thunder roll sounds – first a soft rumble in the distant, then gradually building up into the sheet of white noise we experience during rainstorms and overpowering the soft wave sounds.

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This kind of immersion is something that I am interested in for this project. It’s quite interesting to see how the artists has incorporated his works into the real-life setting, adding an extra dimension to the existing exhibit. However, this work,utilizes 51 speakers in total, so creating that sense of immersion would be a little bit more difficult for me.

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Written Response

Response to Mcluhan’s ‘Visual and Acoustic Space’:

I find that it is interesting to think about how man perceived and expressed themselves pre-literature via what Mcluhan describes as ‘acoustic space structure’. I have not been exposed to this ‘acoustic space structure vs. visual space structure’ theory before and it is quite surprising to learn that there is an alternative to the way we perceive the world around us usually. While I agree that sequential relationships and the promotion of logic as a series (proper time, proper place) is prevalent in society today, I don’t agree with his argument that the “middle ground is excluded”, and that people have been nurtured to favour the eye. Music and audio is such a big part of society, whether it’s a well-produced soundtrack for a film or a catchy hit, that people are always going to be both the visual and audio components. Even though the visual aspect of a piece might draw the viewer more, I believe the sound component does just as much for the piece as a whole. Even if the viewer does not appreciate it, that does not undermine its importance.

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Project Statement:

For my project this semester I wanted to continue exploring the process of creating a sound piece for something like a short film or web video. In the process, I discovered a popular series of Youtube videos entitled “Music Videos without Music”, which as the name suggests, replaces the backing track of popular music videos with realistic Foley, sound effects, dialogue etc., making for an interesting viewing experience. It takes the viewer out of the hyperreal bubble you are suspended in while you watch a well-produced music video, and instead grounds it in reality because it feels like you are just watching the singers on set. I spent some time researching popular Western music videos form various mainstream artists, but ultimately settled on something a little less popular. The music video that I chose was for Mandopop singer Khalil Fong’s new single entitled “Wu Kong”, which included elements from one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese Literature, ‘Journey to the West’, depicting the Monkey King Sun Wukong, along with his mentor Tang Sanzang and his friends Zhu Bajie and Sha Wujing as they set out to bring back Buddhist scriptures from Leiyin Temple on Vulture Peak in India. In regards to my sound piece, I was inspired by various wuxia (a genre of Chinese fiction concerning the adventures of martial artists in ancient China) films such as ‘An Empress and the Warriors’, ‘Kung Fu Hustle’, ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’ and ‘Curse of the Golden Flower’. A common attribute in wuxia films which differ from Western films is exaggerated fight sounds, such as loud yelling in hand-to-hand combat, unrealistically loud impacts and fast whipping noises to enhance the action and really sell the heaviness of the fights (in contrast to the quiet scuffles of films such as the Bourne Series), which I tried to incorporate into the fight scenes in this music video. I used a combination of self-recorded sound effects (such as the kitchen noises, footsteps, cloth shuffles, metal clangs etc.) and online resources for sounds I wouldn’t be able to record (eg. Helicopter noises, fire). In contrast to many of the “Music Videos without Music” clips, which incorporated many funny noises such as the singers singing badly and awkward bodily noises such as farting or burping, to create a comedic effect, I wanted to score this music video as if it were a live-action movie, recreating the soundscapes in the different scenes from scratch, as in the original music video there was only backing music and absolutely no sound effects. For the slow-motion shots, I slowed down the background chatter and added a lot of reverb to the sound clip, to give it that echo-y, ringing tone we often hear in the movies. I also overlaid them with a low rumbling noise to emulate the noise you hear when you cover your ears (the blood rushing). The other scenes were a bit more straight forward, with a lot of different little pieces layered on each other, such as the camera click, kitchen washing sounds, outdoor ambience, footsteps, etc., to create a realistic and believable setting.

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Project Statement

For this particular project, I wanted to create a sense of eeriness and unease to accompany the video provided, and to subtly put the viewer on edge. The video depicts what looks to be the death of a young and the subsequent aftermath, and thus I found that the mood I was trying to create fit perfectly with the story. I took inspiration from true-crime and old sci-fi television shows, and also from low-budget B-movies from the 50’s and 60’s, such as the infamous Plan 9 from Outer Space. Those genres of film and television, especially the low budget ones, usually relied more on sound as a story-telling device as their budget would not allow for more elaborate sets or costumes.  In order to create this brooding sound I overlaid an echoing hum that plays throughout the entire video, and also added in different clashing sounds towards the end of the video, such as the film grain, dial-up tones and circuit whistling, to serve as an unnerving climax and cliff-hanger to the scene.

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Soul-inspired organ chords Jazz trumpets Piano improvisation Soft, whisper-like vocals

#SoundCloud #music #Tru Thoughts

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Reading Response - Sound as Virtual Image

I agree with the author’s argument that audio stimulation in the world has really been dampened to nothing more than background distraction. The same can be said about the world around us visually, but there are many more visual things people are attracted to while walking around e.g. advertisements, billboards, shops. It would be interesting to see (or rather, hear) someone use audio and sound as a primary means of getting people’s attention on the street ie some sort of advertising. In saying that, I reckon that music itself is a form of audio “art”, and we don’t have to go to museums, or special installations to appreciate it, we can have it anywhere: phones, iPods, etc. And as the author says it lets us create the visuals in our minds, as we don’t need to be looking at anything to enjoy it.

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Yang Fudong Response

The piece that impacted me the most during the exhibition visit was definitely The Fifth Night. Something about the 7 screens broadcasting the scenes simultaneously made what would otherwise be a bland video turn into a surreal experience. I think the fact that there was no dialogue stripped down a layer of distractions that would definitely take away from the piece. Every character seems to act with a determined purpose, as if it were a staged play, instead of something like a traditional TV drama. The sound is also very deliberately placed. The only sounds I can recall are the very soft ambient noises, such as wind or the rustling of leaves, and the crunching of the shoes. Everyone else is complete silence. Again, I believe this is to emphasize the purely the performances, as multiple screens is already enough to disorient a viewer.

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Final Statement

For my semester 2 project I created a dramatic trailer for a sci-fi film. I decided to produce a trailer as I had had experience creating sound environments for short films and animations in my major, and was interested in exploring this further. I used both recorded sounds and sampled sounds from the internet. I recorded my voice and also the violin in the sound suite, while I obtained news report soundbites from Youtube, and other miscellaneous sound effects from Freesound.org. 

The beginning of the piece starts off quiet and peaceful, as I wanted to lure the listener into a sense of calm. I also added low rumbling bass throughout as sort of an ambient sound, having it there just so it would not be completely silent during transitions. As soon as I finish talking though, the sound cuts off and soundbites of news reports start flowing in. I purposefully layered the news reports together to portray the event as having significance on a large scale, so as to be picked up by many different sources. The layering of the soundbites produces a chaotic, yet repetitive sound; human voices can clearly be discerned, but what they are actually saying is difficult to pick up. The sounds then transition to a scene in public where people are being attacked by aliens. I purposefully made the volume gradually increase, and kept on layering different elements, again to create a chaotic and messy atmosphere.

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Semester 2 Project

For my semester 2 project, I want to produce a piece of sound that would accompany a movie trailer, using different instruments such as strings, drums and even a voice-over. The mood that I want for this piece would be that of awe and wonder. Below are some movie trailers with soundscapes that capture what I am trying to produce.

Man of Steel

Alien

The Dark Knight

Godzilla

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Final Statement

My aim for this assignment was to create a calm piece of music inspired by bands such as The XX and Daughter. Many signature traits of that type of ‘indie’ genre is the use of a looping electric guitar track, synthesizers, and minimalistic percussion. 

I started off by collecting pieces for the main music track. I recorded myself playing electric guitar and bass, using the Rode NTG2 Boom Mic connected to a Zoom H4 microphone. I had to record off of the amp, which gave me a lot of interfering buzzing noises. Luckily, with a little bit of help from the internet I managed to EQ most of the unnecessary buzzing out of the final mix, leaving a clean tone. For the main picking parts of the piece, I basically just left the recorded parts as they were; but to create a syth sound for the background of the music piece, I recorded myself on the electric guitar playing different chords. I then applied a lot of reverb, and faded the in and out points so that the chords would come in nicely.

I only had access to one bass drum, so for all the other beats I used my mouth and hands to create the required sounds. Thankfully, since I recorded in the Sound Suite, I did not have to deal with any unnecessary ambience. 

My chosen sound elements were: atmosphere (the beginning moments, a glimpse of the “practice session”), music (much of the actual piece itself, all the instruments), and sound effects (beatboxing, clapping). 

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Some screenshots of my progress and workflow in Pro Tools