I’ve gone back slightly to the drawing board after having a few sessions with academic support. Rethinking about my planning and research. I also watched a few videos on other people explaining their research process for essays and there was one that really stuck with me.
First, create a table book name or source, then the quote or bit of information you wish to use or find interesting or even gives you ideas to speak about. Then the page and finally the publisher.
See example.
I’ve been doing research through a few books on noise pollution and its ideas/themes. I’m not at a stage of continuing my script draft/essay and if parts are needed to add to it.
Last Night I focussed on the most delicate part which was in the scene the mother is looking for pills, she finds the one she needs and rolls the pillbox towards her and gives it to her child.
The first part of the recording was the pillbox being moved and then rolled. I searched through the foley area looking for something similar. I started with using little stones and putting them in a plastic cup but when hearing and doing the foley I found the stones to be too low pitch and sound heavier than what is on screen. Mathias came to help me and offered me this box of pins in a plastic container and it sounded very alike. I recorded in time to the video and captured what I needed.
I then concentrated on the roll that pillbox does, I found a plastic lid and rolled it on the glass of the painting. As the pillbox rolls on a glass shelf. I did a few attempts and it sounded perfect on screen.
Then the last part of the moving of toy at the very end before he drops it off the metal shelf. I layered up some plastic pieces into a bowl and scraped and moved them in time on this piece of metal I found. It sounded ok, not perfect. I will need to do a bit of post-editing to make it work. Again, I feel like I need to do a long sound editing session and see what else I need to record instead of just recording a lot of sounds.
Today I planned to transfer all the recordings I did on logic back to pro tools. I bounced out individual stems of each channel and transferred them into the pro tools session.
I then imported the atmospheres and got to create a rough edit. I colour coded each group category and edited the gain structure on pro tools.
I also trimmed the audio files and left a little tail on each side for when I get to the real editing stage. This was just a rough edit as I wasn’t sure exactly where I was in the whole process. I had a Pro Tools file with feet sounds and a Logic file with other sound effects as the video engine doesn’t work on my M1 Macbook Pro.
I now feel a little more aware of the whole clip and where I stand with work. In terms of recording, some of my foley work has spill of bass from the synth bench and the comp room of other people using the spaces. I also found my interior atmos weren’t too good and everything has a lot of hiss. Now, this is without any mixing so I’m not being too negative. I would say I only need to re-record a few things and should be on the editing/mixing stage in the next day or two.
Today I continued on from last weeks session. I needed to record the rest of the cloth tracks. I brought with me denim jeans to record the sounds of the denim jacket the daughter was wearing. I also brought with me my housemate’s knitted jumper for the mother. I performed the clothing sounds differently to the child from yesterday. As the daughter was older and more aware she moved more quietly. And the mother even more so. She was the most careful.
Foley solo session
I also recorded the child drawing on the floor. To create this noise I brought my paintbrush and recorded the sound of the wooden handle and the actual brush in synch to his movements. I didn’t have a crayon so had to improvise. I will layer these sounds in post.
Foley pit & Paint Brush
The next session and all I have left to record is the toy moving on the shelf and the mother handling the pills before passing it to her child. This will be the most tedious foley part yet.
Andrew Pierre Hart’s practice is inter-disciplinary based in painting. The main focus of his work is the symbiotic relationship between sound and painting. His practice is an ongoing rhythmic research and play of improvised and spontaneous generative processes, through various mediums: sound, video, performance, found object and image, language, photography and installation, and themes of: improvisation, collective memory, cross-modality, spatialisation, musicality and rhythmology .
Andrew studied MA Painting at The Royal College of Art 2017-19 and BA Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art 2014-17. Hart is an associate lecturer on the Painting pathway at Camberwell College and Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art .
Andrew is currently showing at Mixing it up Painting today at The Hayward Gallery. He also presented ‘S:3 E:3s The Alter-native Trace ( Bass and Space)’ a series of paintings at Frieze London. He was part of ArtAngel’s ‘Thinking Time ‘ 20/21 and a resident at Beaconsfield Gallery.
Liquin Live ( Andrew Hart & Janek Nixon) in Session
Liquin Live ( Andrew Hart & Janek Nixon) in Session @ ‘ The Grid of The Secret Blueberry Paintings & Other Documents-Degree Show 2019 Royal College of Art –
I listened to this live performance with Andrew was involved in. It’s described as.
I wonder how these speakers were built according to specifications? and the actual performance context. There isn’t a lot on this except a 1hour audio clip which I listened to for about ten minutes.
The sounds were captivating. Sometimes vocals would come in and out of the recording. It felt emotional and perhaps improvised? It would be cool to see the actual set-up as it sounds really interesting, especially the handbuilt speakers.
Sound Painting
I found a section on his website called Sound Paintings. I read that it was his reaction to sometimes albums other times his friends improvising on their instrument. He wants to capture his emotional state reacting to the music.
I found these paintings really simple on the surface but I felt they conveyed a deeper meaning. I would like to know what the source was that made him paint these.
I find this sort of idea of transmuting one thing into another really interesting. Reminds me of the other work of Åsa Stjerna. She did sonifying the data of scientists into sounds for installations. This is the reverse. Taking audio and morphing It into something else. I’m curious to hear how this was developed.
Post Lecture Reflection
Andrew begins his lecture by speaking on his love for sounds, the rattle of a bike. The turntable and the record, he states he loves the shape and design of these two things.
One of his earliest works would be that he would find spaces that were empty in university. And he wanted to almost do graffiti but not leave marks or stains. He was interested in the space that was dormant and then he would throw balls down a slanted flooring to hear the acoustics in the room. He was interested in space and how it reacts.
Another piece was a video he filmed in Amsterdam with bikes riding past. It felt like a static sound walk. Tuning in and out were themes in his ideas. The space became something alive and you can see and feel the rhythm. How do we make our own sounds then? That’s the next step for him.
The ideas of listening, through the pandemic. The black lives matter, the storming the capital. Were all important themes in his work over lockdown when he received his artist residency.
He was given an arts residency during the pandemic and he wanted to relate it to a few things, one was the idea of the past and improvisation. Using stones as cavemen were improvisation. He invited a few artists to collaborate in these spaces. People that hadn’t performed in over a year.
He invited the artists to sit down and communicate without speaking. He would ask questions and they would reply without lyrics. The reply was interesting, he felt and knows that music is another language and it was interesting. carving out space, if you’re trying to create a new space. Try to shape it to be different. he would think about pathways and how we can relate and connect through doing. And to him, sound arts is a new pathway in a way especially in fine arts.
I found Andrews work captivating. He uses sound in a different context to the other practitioners so far and combines it with his other disciplines. Painting and turning his favourite albums into artwork was a good idea. Other uses of sounds in spaces and installation work I haven’t seen before.
I think one of the most interesting parts of his lecture was his self-awareness. As someone like himself who isn’t formally trained in audio, he really approaches it completely from fine art. An almost relieving thought process occurs when there are no boundaries set.
I did a foley session yesterday with Raul and forgot to export the files back to my laptop so I lost around three hours of work. We mainly did foley for cloth and a few little SFX in the clip. I decided to go in alone today and redo what we did. Try and be more efficient and see if it was possible to record alone.
Foley setup
I had my laptop hooked up via HDMI to the tv and a smaller interface to record the 416 in. I also had to use Logic Pro X to record as the Pro Tools video engine doesn’t work yet with the new M1 chip MacBook Pros.
I began by recording cloth entirely for the smaller boy child. He was wearing a sleeveless puffer and my jacket had the same texture as his. I record about 5-6 scenes and performed them with my jacket.
I then recorded an SFX of a bottle being opened and poured into a child’s mouth. I had my own water bottle to do this. I made sure to follow the script and concept of the movie and really keep the movements minimalistic and not loud.
I then recorded the atmosphere scene at the beginning of the film clip. There was a bag of tape of different thicknesses and materials in a basket. I used the thinner brown tape for the wind rustling grass, and the thicker black tape for the leaves moving in the second scene. The thinner brown tape had a lighter gentler sound in contrast to the other tape.
I also recorded the sound of the toy falling off the shelf which the daughter catches. I felt it would have more than one layer to it. I recorded three parts. An apple mouse for the light plastic sound when caught. A large clock for the more beefy sound of the toy. And a light layer of this thing I can’t describe but it had a rattle to it which a toy would have and I will add that as a final layer.
I also recorded a small plastic cup, in the scene the small child is on a milk crate trying to grab the rocket ship toy. I felt like the crate would be quietly creaking. I also recorded and squeezed the cup as an SFX.
The last recording I did today was of the wanted posters, the posters fluttering on the board. There was a notebook full of old paper that felt and sounded like the ones on screen. Not quite perfect A4 paper but the right consistency and texture. I recorded a few as I want to layer them up to immerse the scene.
Now I need to do at least a rough edit and plan the next foley session tomorrow. I’ve got a lot done today and plan to do the rest of the recordings alone. Unless someone decides to help me as I managed to be a lot more efficient.
Lucia H Chung is a Taiwanese artist based in London, UK. She holds a Master degree in Sculpture (Distinction) from Winchester School of Art and a PhD degree in Sonic Arts from Goldsmiths, University of London. She performs and releases music under the alias ‘en creux’ where the sound creation springs from her fascinations in noise generated via feedback on digital and analogue equipment, and her role as a mediator-performer in the multifaceted relationship between the sonic events incurring within the self-regulated system. She also works as a broadcaster and an independent curator at Happened. She has curated and organised residency programmes and music events around the UK and Europe, including a 3-month Taiwanese Experimental Music residency for MusicHackspace at Somerset House Studios in 2018, Inland virtual residency between lacking Sound Fest. (Taiwan) and IKLECTIK (UK) in 2020, and a panel discussion on video Game Music as part of Grounding Practice at Somerset House Studios in 2021.
INTERVIEW: LUCIA H CHUNG with ATTN: MAGAZINE
This interview with Lucia H Chung is about her work and current show about to go live in the coming weeks (at the time). They begin by asking her where the idea for a Taiwanese music festival came from.
She says it’s that whenever she goes to china town she sees lots of posters for Chinese and Japanese gigs and shows and she’d never see any for Taiwanese music apart from pop stars who come over.
They continue to ask about where the idea came from. The fact that she had this idea in her head for a while. How did this come to fruition?
She says she acts on impulse a lot and doesn’t think too much about the outcomes it’s more of a bottom-up process she says. On her trip to Taiwan, she didn’t really have a chance to go to loads of live gigs and instead went to record shops. She felt as she moved here as an international student back when she was studying her status was not certain but now it is she wanted to connect her people to where she lives now. Bring them over to experience new things.
The Water by en creux
Album Cover
I first listened to Fog after reading the bio of the album. This album was a two-track piece based on no-input feedback mixers. The two sides depict deficiency and surplus respectively: the first a semi-solid hum that flickers on the brink of becoming, the second a harsh buzz that presses into excess until it warps. Balance and stillness, so readily associated with a drone, are therefore illusory – only ever implied in the cancelling-out of these deviations from equilibrium, manifesting as a non-state framed by exertion, arriving within that silent pause between these two exquisitely manoeuvred tilts.
I did really find the first Fog song captivating. We’ve used no input mixing in the lectures with Milo and it’s interesting to see it in a real-world scenario. I find the laid back approach of letting the machine take the lead. Just guiding the sounds into drone sounds is really captivating. You get lost in the sounds and let the filters guide your thoughts.
Lucia began by speaking around the curatorial things she’s done, starting from monthly radio programs and artist interviews. And now the program has gone through transition and change she can reflect on it. So she usually loves to ask this as the first question in most of her interviews which is “What is your background? And how did you get where you are as an artist?”
I think this question makes sense it’s important to know someone’s background to see their bias and their motivation, why are they doing what they are doing?
For her, she moved to England when she started her masters at Winchester and she was one of two only non-English speaking people in her class. She didn’t find the English pub culture that interesting so she just sat in the background a lot, most likely as English wasn’t her first language, she felt she couldn’t community effectively. She found it interesting the gap between translation and how a person feels when they’re caught in this situation.
So for her, this was a huge inspiration. And she feels like her work has evolved from this experience. One specific project she did at her masters was related to photos. She was told she had a different personality between speaking mandarin and speaking English. And she wanted to put herself in front of the camera and study herself closely. She wanted to investigate this change.
She found in the photos she took when speaking mandarin were completely different to her speaking English. This invoked a deep question thought process for her and linked to other works.
She then spoke about her work in 2009, Spring piece stereo recording. She had just moved from Winchester to London, Newcross area and found it extremely busy and full of noise pollution. No longer in a lovely town but a busy area. She decided to record her window as she lived opposite the main road and used a piezo mic that she clipped to the window. She looped up the sound of the recording and played it back into the piezo mic, she stated it was one of her first loop/noise or no inputting mixing sort of work.
To her, it sounded like an angel or a flight to heaven. A really cool concept. I remember Cai using no-input mixing in the lecture with Milo, we were improvising as a collective and the sounds coming out of that machine were incredible. I can see how noise and noise pollution inspired her work. London is really a shock when moving here, I felt the same when I first moved from Brighton. A lot of sounds is overwhelming at first here.
I think overall that Lucias work is captivating and her expression on the day came through her presentation. I found that her curation relating to her heritage and also her self-aware state towards her current surroundings and how she can benefit that place whilst not taking away from it was a benefit to hear about.
I watched my clip after recording footstep sounds and felt I should have recorded my atmos sounds first. To not only help the foley artist who was doing it but also for me to not nitpick my sounds.
I watched the clip back and looked at my initial sound plan and realised it was mainly three-ish atmospheres. The initial village outside the pharmacy. The close up against the wall with the missing posters. Then the varying changes in the pharmacy. I really needed some isolated atmosphere and felt it was almost impossible to record in London so I took a weekend out ton Brighton as it’s where I’m from originally and I know the place well enough that I can cycle outside the city and have no noise pollution.
I rented out the Sennheiser 418 for its stereo recordings with a mid-side polar pattern for the lovely stereo sounds I was promised to receive. I also decided to use the Sound Devices 633 as previously the other recording box ZOOM F4 had very loud preamps.
The night before I learnt the machines and prepared for the next day. Wired my bags up, scouted locations and made a plan to record. I started with recording sounds of the ocean at low tide, I got really close on the rocks to the ocean holding my mic stand. I wanted to also get these recordings to use for experiments as Tim spoke about recording at 192khz and reducing the octave for frequencies we wouldn’t normally hear for sound design. I will follow up with a blog post after I’ve done this well as I’m really interested.
Sound Devices 633
I then cycled up to a small farm area with a plot of green land and set up my mic and started recording, I found that even though I was more than a mile away I could pick up road sounds. I felt really frustrated, I recorded anyway and decided to keep heading away from roads. I walk and arrived near another farm around the university of Sussex. I pushed the gate and heard a really creaky horrible metal sound and decided to record it again at 192khz for experiments later. It sounded like the perfect scary movie metal gate.
Atmos Recording With 418
I went up the hill and pointed the mic towards the scenery and managed to find a spot without any noise pollution (fingers crossed) I waited until planes drove past and set my timing correctly, even sometimes lowering the mic to reduce the spread and pointing away from roads, I figured this out after subtly even more than a few miles away still hearing the road traffic.
Adjusting gain
I haven’t yet put the atmospheres into my clip but the process will begin tomorrow most likely.
I started by inserting one of the atmospheres I recorded over the weekend in Brighton. I had known about compression anyway before the lecture but felt I wanted to practice on it anyway. I loaded in an ocean-atmosphere and used the logic compressor as my pro tools wouldn’t download or work with plugins.
Logic Pro X compresser
I found the more interesting parts the attack and release. I found that when using the attack with very little time and the ratio incredibly high just to notice it, it stood out obviously. The knee helped in smoothing it but I wanted it to do it in extremes so I could notice it. I messed around with the other settings as well such as switching compressor types from vintage to classic. Each had its own sort of flavour and distortion sounds. Sound parameters were gone to reflect on the vintage equipment. I’m glad I did a bit of messing around as I have to compress a few things in my clip and this will give me a bit more context after that lecture.
My choice of podcast is The Guardians podcast on Spotify. Titled, where does the world go from here?
The audio paper affords performative aesthetics.
The podcast, in the beginning, had introduction music, synthesisers playing to create a futuristic atmosphere based on the topic of climate change. It creates an interesting aesthetic. The way the performer speaks as well inclines a more newsworthy podcast than an extremely performative one. I also enjoyed the field recordings used when speaking about the summit in Scotland, when speaking about the crowds they used actual crowd recordings.
2. The audio paper is idiosyncratic.
I wouldn’t say this specific podcast is idiosyncratic. But I would say I also don’t listen to enough podcasts to establish whether or not there is anything immensely unique to this podcast. One thing perhaps is the use of going back and forth between live interviews almost like a radio show, which then goes back towards actual recordings and sound effects, music to set the scene.
3. The audio paper is situated and partial.
I would say this podcast is situated and partial. It’s situated on our current time and understanding of climate change. The reasons why climate change is important and also an uncertain future. It’s very situated. Partial as well, the speaker is contrasting against the person being interviewed.
4. The audio paper evokes effects and sensations.
The use of sound effects and music evokes sensations and has powerful effects. Even the way the narrator speaks, in contrast to the person being interviewed who has a more confident voice speaking with authority. The narrator speaks at times with emotions of sadness and anger towards the narrator almost as if she is the issue. I think the overall production for this podcast was designed specifically to evoke emotion over this topic that is currently really important. The summit in Scotland.
5. The audio paper is multifocal; it assembles diverse and often heterogeneous voices.
This podcast could have better use of heterogeneous voices. Although I agree to an extent with this podcast. I think it really skewered towards the anti-big business and coal usage. Again it’s not that I disagree with this statement but more that it didn’t bring a balanced argument. Didn’t discuss the other side, why don’t the big business what to get rid of it? Is this actually realistic?
6. The audio paper has multiple protagonists, narrators and material agencies.
I would say this podcast does this very well. There are multiple protagonists, interviewers and narrators. Usage of sounds and recordings to build atmospheres. Sound design and music. Perhaps the narration could be improved as it does change, but not a lot. It’s mainly the male voice throughout asking questions and one could ask potentially why that is? I think it could perhaps be a systematic patriarchal choice, patriarchy usually has the idea that the man rules the house and society. So we should always have a man asking the questions and being the overall narrator.
7. The audio paper brings aesthetics and technology together in mediation.
This podcast uses masters and mixing. Recording and production to its uses. Music production and sound editing. Recording, samples and other techniques. I think it does it well, in contrast to this point it hits the nail on the head. Specifically with the mixing and mastering.
8. The audio paper is a constituent part of broader ecologies.
I would say this podcast only touches on this point. It does reflect the topic of global warming to wider countries and cultures. Using recordings of other countries leaders speaking about what global warming does. How it affects different countries differently. But also doesn’t really touch to much apart from the use of samples/recordings.
