After speaking with Toby he did confirm that perhaps I was thinking a few things for my essay. That I had to focus on the specifics of what I’m attempting to speak about. He did say I seemed motivated and passionate about what I’m writing which gave me reassurance towards my topic. I shared a few books I was reading and he agreed they seemed relevant and to continue the pursuit. He also agreed that the essay and the creative project related very well and was happy to hear I had already planned the second part of the hand in submission.
Toby gave me further guidance to perhaps looks into meditation and into noise the ideas of noise for different people, to speak In that perspective is interesting for him he says. As well he mentioned accessibility and wellbeing within field recordings. Again something I agreed would be great to bring into my essay.
I also asked Toby about my plan which was to finish the essay in its entirety by the end of the spring break so when I return as the lectures shift towards a more creative project orientated stance I have already done the essay which will feed the parameters of the recordings. I spoke that my idea was to create an album of field recordings that bring peace and reduce anxiety. Maybe something that people can put on when they’re anxious in public and need to listen. He spoke about autism and over-sensitive sensory problems with audio and perhaps if my recordings could help this.
That the science, as well as the artistic research in the essay, can allow for the creative practical project to have the rules and statistics or information to guide the process. To not just create with motivation and spontaneity but also with an idea of what the goals are within the project. With active listening and deep unconscious listening.
Really great feedback that has given me more perspective and drive towards this essay. Instead of dreading the essay, I do believe this is a chance to do the research for the practical. So when I begin the recordings I can already know what I have to do in terms of the theory behind it. The meaning, and goals.
The next step for me really is to do research. Acquire thoughts ideas and delve within the field recording/wellbeing area once again.
I have been taking it easy on the actual thought process behind my essay coming up for submission. I have been allowing thoughts to brew within and allow me to manifest them into physical actions through curiosity rather than need. I have been thinking about my last audio paper in that I spoke about field recordings, noise pollution and the effect this has on humans. I wish to perhaps elaborate on the field recordings section.
I find more and more my practice of field recording to be captivating me towards a potential career goal and also theoretical ideas. I enjoy the escapism that field recordings present. The idea of hunting for sounds, locating where things are. The outdoors of recording within the field. As well as the positive effects field recordings of ambience and locations can give us in terms of wellbeing. Escaping modern-day city lives with a pair of headphones. Close your eyes and you can be in a beautiful peaceful forest, even a beach.
I’m curious about creating an album of music towards this for part two of my hand in submission and using part one as research for the critical guidance the second part requires. Instead of just recording sounds and creating things I associate with relaxation and escapism as well as benefits to my wellbeing. I believe a greater approach would be to use part one of the hand in the submission of the essay section to research and speak about the importance of field recording with an interest in deep listening. The abstract art of field recordings, escapism? Well, being, research into meditation. Not stereotypical but meditation within works such as field recording. And perhaps immersion with soundscapes into VR worlds. Again this is quite a large subject as they have always been with and 2500 words aren’t enough to capture and speak on everything together so I’ll attempt to refine these thoughts but creating some abstracts as the last term with the audio paper worked for understanding if I it’s even possible within the 2500-3000 word constraint.
I’ve been curious to read into practitioners of field recording and understand why they wish to do this, such artists as Hildegard Westerkamp really do captivate me with her compositions.
I have managed to find a few books which capture my curiosity, and seem to have similar themes associated with, they are.
In The Field: The Art Of Field Recording by Cathy Lane and Angus Carlyle
On Listening by Cathy Lane and Angus Carlyle
Writing the field recording: sound, word, environment / edited by Stephen Benson, Will Montgomery.
Autumn leaves sound and the environment in artistic practise/edited by Angus Carlyle.
Steven speaks on knowing through relations and how this insists that one does not simply “acquire” knowledge but, rather, that one knows through an ongoing cumulative and interactive acoustemology. I agree completely. He speaks on that knowledge isn’t just through attempting to know but through ongoing interaction with the environment as the tribe’s people, he was surrounded were doing.
He also mentions that while the idea of an anthropology of sound was meant to help decolonize ethnomusicology’s disciplinary paradigms, the presence of”anthropology” still made it too human-centric; the prepositional “of” marked too much distance and separation, and the nominal “sound” seemingly made it more about propagation than perception, more about structure than process. It was a case of”the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”
Again another great point that struck me about understanding the study of sound. And Steven makes a point here that we are still involving ourselves as humans in studies. Not understanding sound and its relationship with the environment and objects but rather its relationship with us. Deeming that all ideas stem from the human interpretation of sound. That sound doesn’t exist within itself.
Unlike acoustic ecology, acoustemology is about the experience and agency of listening histories, understood as relational and contingent, situated and reflexive.
Likewise, it refuses to replace visualist ocularcentrism with sonocentrism as any sort of determining force of essentialist sensory master plans. I also agree, one isn’t better than the other and he speaks that his goals aren’t to skew the reader’s views into believing sound is more important. That sonocentrism is better than ocularcentrism.
Overall I do believe this article allowed me a deeper understanding of knowledge within sound itself and learning from sound. That there isn’t one way of learning. Sound itself can teach us our surroundings, specific ques that dictate problems in our environment. Difficult for some of us that live in urban environments to imagine this, although we in urban environments have different ques than others for example living in a rainforest.
After today’s lecture with Ingrid about learning and using FMOD I was finding it hard to understand the exact context of the reasons to use FMOD. To encode the sound and present it to the game’s designers already processed was what I received? I should take some time by myself to experiment more and see the benefits and negative and to do decide if I wish to use this platform.
I do find the middle ground between DAW and Engine to be a strange place to edit and encode. I feel I would rather see the visual stimulation when encoding and deciding the effects of the audio in the space rather than a timeline. Like wise when using effects I would prefer to create and use them in a DAW.
But after playing this Cafe Oto game I have understood a little bit more about the design of sound in a game. Although a game, the premise of it is that it’s an instrument where you run around activating sounds and creating a loop with your character to engage complex patterns. I thought the coding behind how this works to be captivating and engaging for the interactive user. It did have me thinking if they used FMOD and I assume so. Seeing other ways of interactive media with coded sound has given me more context towards my game, and application of my audio within it.
Halfway through the lecture, we were given time to speak as groups on the current stance of our group and how we are operating and to plan further for next week’s tutorial. As I and Will already had a group meeting with the MA students before the lecture we were very happy with where we stood in the project. As Jingya didn’t attend we shared the information with her about the feedback to music and the stance on sound effects.
We communicated to Jingya that although the game wasn’t at the right development stage to start deciding on the sound effects, we spoke on the need to continue recording and experimenting on the sound effects regardless. I and Will felt and agreed that we shouldn’t wait for them to tell us what they want, rather we create and receive feedback. The process of creating sounds should be more active than waiting for them to tell us what they need.
We all agreed and decided this week for me and Will to create some music. Jingya will begin creating sound effects and I will also experiment with ambience and sounds with field recordings around contact mics and my Zoom H1N.
I am waiting on the PDF and information we asked for in the last meeting from the MA group.
The article begins by speaking about realism for sound not being the same as cinematic realism. Which is governed by our expectations and perceptions of cinematic wolds and not the real-world experience. Recording sound effects as well are not just recording but more construction of sounds. Sound for film isn’t about just capturing but performing as ben Burt did for the lightsaber.
The article also compares sound and image construction in unison to be the process of representation and abstraction which I agree with what’s said. It is the balance between what’s seen and the idea of what it could be.
When designing star wars they wanted to make sure the film and its world were reliable, realistic and authentic. Before this most sci-fi soundscapes were using the theremin and other electronic sounds which seemed cliche and took the context out of films. This meant that when designing the sound for this film Ben Burt decided to go against that and make something more realistic and industrial. They wanted it to sound like a “used future”
The sound design in the first scene for StarWars uses the laser sounds to incorporate more than just shooting. It shows a sense of space, temporality and depth/continuity of the environment. You can hear the laser shots you see on screen and others off-screen. Which creates a sense of a world that is alive and exists beyond the limits of what we see.
Ben Burt speaks on his thoughts on field recording. It’s more than recording a source or sound its also the relationship between that sound and the space around it. The air has a lot to do with it. It’s a perfume of sound he says.
Motifs in sound are also added towards the picture, with good vs evil, love and romance, Industrial future. This allowed for sounds to portray these motifs as well. With more heavy mean sounding vehicles using low end and harsher sounds for enemy dark side ships and lighter smoother sounds for the rebels.
The rebel ships were also sound designed to be jankier and put together like scrap ships through sound and the empire was more high tech, well constructed.
He also pitched the lightsabers to different tones, Darth faders being a minor key and ben Kenobi’s is more of a C major chord. And when they get together to fight there is disharmony.
With R2D2 they managed to convey emotions and communicate without speech but using sounds and bleeps. Performing with sound the same way a human does with language. The tone, the speed, the pitch, the performance made a difference in understanding R2D2.
Overall this article brings critical reflection on the abilities of sound design to convey messages and meanings. As well as motifs, space, georgarphy. Time, power, struggle. Evil, good. Anything to an extent, and also touches on the ability we have to passively relate that to common contexts in our society. And the balance between abstract and reality can create a buffer zone in which sound design exists.
I decided as it was part of my goals to learn synthesis and the modular this term that it also fits in perfectly to the music asked for in this video game. I booked the synth lab and started practising and learning the machine. I began playing on the Minilogue which is very simple and has built-in presets for you to play with. I recorded long play sessions of exploring these sounds onto logic which I will further refine.
I also began watching videos on the euro rack. I wanted to record some sounds that were progressive and ambient. I decided to watch a video explaining the terminology of modular synthesis and what everything means. VCO? VCA? CV? and understanding the fundamentals of modular synthesis.
I began playing around with the Eurorack and deciding what to go and how to do it. I found modular synthesis to be very organic and progressive with the patching. I sort of understood what was happening but it was almost as if the audio was leading me down a path and not necessarily the other way around. I created a few ideas and recorded for around thirty-forty minutes to get a varied range of sounds to use for composition in Ableton for music in the video game.
Here is a photo of a patch of something I made.
Towards the end, I found this Eurorack didn’t quite offer what I wanted and felt like it was back to the drawing board. Perhaps instead of using synthesis as the main compositional tool, I can sample what I’ve recorded onto Ableton and create an actual piece of music that resembles what I’ve been asked to do.
I also discovered VCV Rack towards the end of my three-hour session in the synthesis room. A free open-source modular rack unit to play around with. I will keep using this to practice my skills and to bounce any sounds and patches I make to use in Ableton for my music submission.
After my session, I ended up with some sounds from the Minilogue and Eurorack modular synthesizer. As well as VCV Rack and further synthesis knowledge with a plan for what’s coming. I believe I must now combine what I’ve sampled from the synth bench alongside Ableton and perhaps record some ambient sound design effects? Other skills I’ve learnt from previous modules. And look deeper into sound/music for games knowledge.
Florence was one of the names given to use as a reference for gameplay. Not necessarily the music but I felt it was useful to start researching into other games to understand video game music. It’s a whole different ball game to normal conventional music.
I’ve been listening to the soundtrack and it’s very orchestral, perhaps wrong for the style of the game which they spoke about is 80s themes futuristic aesthetic. I did have ideas of recording my housemate Daniel playing his violin as he is grade eight on his instrument. He also plays the piano to a high level and I would simply ask him to improvise over some drums I would have made. But I feel this is perhaps the wrong way going forth into this design. I need to relook elsewhere.
The composer of the soundtrack is called Kevin Penkin, he has composed for a few anime cartoons and I felt this matched the art style perfectly. As well as the themes of the game which is around adulthood, relationships and finding yourself in this world. Very simple but evokes the emotions that the game wants to feel when playing. The music itself isn’t interactive but conveys the message of the game, which Is something I really wish to do with our group’s work. I need to spend time on synthesisers, as since our last session watching Will operate the Moog Matriarch has made me want to attempt it as well.
After completing a curatorial residency at Wysing Arts Centre as part of Future Curators Network; a programme supporting the career development of D/deaf and Disabled Curators, in partnership with DASH, Hannah now works full time within the Wysing team. Committed to the long-term application of accessibility practices within the arts and working rights of artists, Hannah has worked with Aural Diversity, Deafroots, The National Gallery, London, DASH and ZU-UK; and serves as associate board member for a-n Artists Information Company as well as trustee for Two Queens Gallery, Leicester. Having previously worked as part of the exhibitions team at Nottingham Contemporary, Hannah currently works in an associate capacity to lead on Caption-Conscious Ecology. Hannah is also one half of Dyad Creative, a Franco-British collaboration previously supported by a-n, East Street Arts, National Centre for Writing, Kettle’s Yard, and Arts Council England to lead and develop several temporary artist-led spaces and multiple public art projects.
Her bio shares information about her passions it seems in acessability. It also states in her bio that she finished a residency with the future curators’ network, a program supporting deaf/disabled curators.
I’m interested to see what her views are as a curator and how can we make art and spaces as accessible as possible.
Dr Annie Goh also sent us an email dictating the access requirements that Hannah needs for our visiting practitioner element. Where Hannah explains that she is deaf and requires a few sets of things to help her with the acessability of communication in this online environment. I find it interesting to understand perhaps if she wishes to, her feelings towards sound arts as a medium coming from the perspective of someone who is deaf. How does engaging with sound to hear operate?
The Art of Captioning
Hannah is currently working on a research project into acessability for art centres across England. Since covid 19 many galleries and museums have had to shift and learn how to present their work online for others to consume and enjoy. Many have had to caption and include ways for the deaf and blind/disabled to enjoy these works just as much as others. This research project is into captioning work and how to do it best for each specific situation. To create a broad example of situations to present galleries and museums how to make their work more accessible for others.
I think this is a really important part of art and society in general. I do find in most aspects I am privileged and do forget sometimes about acessability issues with my work. I never write captions or include subtitles. Perhaps I should think about this, for both the sake of myself and the consumer.
Hannah also runs a company with her peer Théodora Lecrinier called Dyad Creative. This company is mainly focused on managing places and artists’ work and allowing artists the opportunity to present their works in new spaces. It seems like Hannah is mainly focused on curation than personally presenting her own work.
Post Lecture Reflection
Hannah begins by explaining her background, she did a degree in fine art and an MA in performance art. And since completing her MA she has been thinking about how we bring people into spaces.
She also mentions that she felt anxious and nervous about speaking on a sound art degree lecture as a visiting practitioner. She’s been deaf since she was 18 months old. And because of this since she was young she’s worn a cochlear implant.
She slowly lost her hearing in her twenties and found herself becoming full deaf once she got into her late twenties. When she lost the best of her hearing she underwent an operation to receive a cochlear implant. And it gave her access to sound she’s never heard before.
This access to the cochlear implant gave her a newfound experience with sound and changed her view of how we exist with sounds in our environments. How sound helps us relate to other people and habits.
One of the first projects Hannah show us wasn’t necessarily working with sonics but to her, this was the first project she was able to work with space. That didn’t just rely on one sense of the human body.
She begins to show a video with a hip hop beat and shows specific works in an environment. This wasn’t a specific sound exhibition.
This led her to start to think about how to present sounds in different ways in her curation. So the next project that has brought her to do this was a project she did with Ain Bailey Version. She was selected to take on the curation of this. It was about broadcasting as a communication tool, and she discovered Ain Bailey and began speaking about her work.
She then showed a video of Ain Bailey explaining her work.
Ain explains this was a love letter to her Jamaican heritage, There were three parts of this exhibition. She created and recorded herself making saltfish and used the sounds into a composition to play in the gallery space. Martha todd created the ackee sculptures and she originally wanted to fill the gallery with the ache plant but instead, she got someone to create sculptures of them.
Another element of her installation in a gallery space was to play linstead Markey a famous folk song she heard as a child in the entrance of the gallery.
Finally, in the small space in the garden of the gallery, it was a love letter to dub. She received some bass lines from Mathew Ritson, and she created her own dub song. Hannah mentions the main point of the exhibition was to give Ain space to speak about her sonic history in this space. And Ain had already been thinking about this already.
She goes on to speak about captioning, it’s to capture audio content into text onto the screen. This is something she says will be used more and more once we understand how to use captioning as a tool. Artists are now considering to do this to their sound work. This project for her was a real turning point for her practice as a curator.
She thinks and believes we need to change the way we approach accessibility and this needs to be integrated into daily practice and not seen as an add on and something that comes at the end of a project when you don’t have much budget or resources left. That’s what became the core of her work now. She now believes that sound is something that can be moved into the realm of those who are hard of hearing or deaf to experience this work.
Her idea is, how do we caption work that currently exists? How do we approach the accessibility of those works? How do we do that sensibly ? The people that enter these spaces may not enter on equal terms. How do we invest this in artwork, live work? Music nights, live events. performances, sound work? How do we experiment and play with these really useful tools? Which will add to the work not take any from it.
How do we visualise sounds, there is a lot of words that are connected to sonic understanding that might not be in a dictionary of someone that isn’t fully immersed in a sound world. How do we move beyond certain words that might not mean something to someone who is deaf? How do people understand these terms?
She explains it similar to being blind, and if you’ve always been blind how can you understand colours? She explains it’s the same with deafness there are certain terms that make it difficult to engage or understand the caption.
The physicality of sound she explains does go beyond listening, it can be experienced through touch and vibration, different translations of sound. The word translation is the word that comes up, time and time again as she develops this work. And so she’s going to end it there and bring It back to the concept of care. For her to work with sound is to take care of it in a different way and find ways of sharing sound with people that haven’t experienced it in different ways.
I found Hannah’s lecture to be captivating and informative without portraying a negative light to her issues. I do find perhaps sometimes Politically correct topics can make me feel overwhelmed as I usually do agree with what’s being said. But I find the way of resolving these issues to be immensely difficult and require a rebuilt attitude amongst our society. I did find her views on captioning work to completely make sense, I agree thoroughly with what she stands for. And I definitely will attempt to make my work more accessible to more people in the future. It was also interesting to see her perspective on sound arts from a deaf person that experiences sound differently than we do.
Today we had our second meeting. I and Will came prepared with the sounds we had made the day before, ready to showcase and receive feedback on the audio we had made. Again at this point, we have been given very little towards what we should be doing in audio and left to our devices but we have taken it towards a synth-wave, vintage 1980s soundscape.
We showed our music and they enjoyed it thoroughly. Out of all pieces they enjoyed number four, number one and number seven the last one. They said perhaps the other songs were too loud and complex for a video game and had too much going on. But they loved the others and thought that they fitted perfectly for level one.
I and Will agreed, I felt the same but was happy to receive feedback. I have got the synth bench booked later this evening and plan to create a few ideas as well as teach myself synthesis on these machines as I am not comfortable entirely with the process.
Will also said he would create a few more things he had in mind at home, some piano sounds of him playing. We also agreed on some soundscapes to go along with the game. Even though it is a 2d minigame thing going on. It can have an ambience.
The MA games design team went on and explained what has happened since the last meeting. They showed us the updated interface and graphics sent from the MA animation and illustration degrees. We were happy to see the design fit in well with our music as well. They then showed a few mock-up ideas of the artwork and we further discussed a plan.
I attempted to ask about their schedule but they did insist they weren’t sure and had an idea to try to finish a few more levels and games. The leader of their group spoke on how they wanted to initially create five levels and now feel like they will only manage three for the hand in. I and Will felt it was important for us on our next step to know how many levels and the motifs and emotions or what is going on, on each level for sound design and music-making.
A loose idea was spoken as they hadn’t finalised any other level except the first one but as it stands it’s.
Level 1: Language, symbol language, a combination of the symbol. Feedback screen/ operation screen. Collect elements they think to unlock the brain feedback section.
Level 2: visual, the peak. Colours?
Level 3:
Level 4: high-speed bpm, tempo
Level 5: Listening, music & sound
This is the current rough ideas of each level and the sound behind it and how they wish to continue. I and Will found this valuable towards our music composition, as this is very similar to what we learnt the last term with our sound for screen module and these things overlap. We really wanted to use sound to convey motifs, themes and emotions rather than just have music playing. As our game isn’t very immersive, it’s not the first person or third person or VR it’s difficult to create that immersion as the others.
We decided that perhaps because of the nature of the game, the levels are about creating different parts of a robot’s brain and it’s slowly developing consciousness that perhaps the music should match what is happening throughout the game? The development of the brain and its emotions can reflect the soundtrack and sounds of each level. The music could start atonal and develops into more complex compositions as the character develops a more completed brain as the levels go on.
We thought this was a great idea and this has now become the premise of the sound design and score of the game. Jingya, unfortunately, couldn’t attend today as her train was cancelled but we will relay the information back to her. So we finished the meeting on a positive note, with more influences to create music and sounds. We were also given another reference for music with this film Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind which I will be watching to understand a little more. I also spoke on sound effects and when that would be the correct time to begin if we haven’t got a developed game yet that needs them? Will also spoke on Phonaesthetics which I hadn’t heard before but is the study of why sounds are satisfying and creating sound effects that give the listener a satisfying feeling when they click or move things around. I feel this will require further research as will making sounds and music for games. I will be reading a few books to inform myself further into this.
Before everyone left I asked the group to email us all the new artwork, new pdf they displayed and a screen recording of the demo of the game being played so we can attach music and see if our soundtracks are working for the game. And we planned to meet again next week same time.
