The most exciting thing to happen this week was the behind-the-scenes walkthrough of Because The Night on Friday. I’ve never experienced immersive theatre before (or much traditional theatre, at that—I can only think of one play I’ve ever been to as an adult), and I really want to see the production soon.
It was great to get little bits of information from David Franzke about the technical side, including seeing/hearing the surface conduction transducers in action, and how the rooms with live audio effects were set up—I have definitely had ideas for similar experiences and learned a lot from what he mentioned. Plus it was great to tag along and try to weasel my way into his conversations with David Chesworth, particularly one moment when they were talking about a piece of software used to make a part of the music for the production (I can’t remember which now; some Arturia software) which used FFT/spectral processing to turn a field recording into a melodic instrument, as it relates to some of my sound experiments this week.
Going upstairs to the control desks with Brendan was fascinating too, as he walked through a lot of Qlab details that were briefly touched on during the main part of the tour. He was very keen to answer any of our questions, but at the same time told us so much that I couldn’t even think of what to ask.
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I’m continuing my research into live audio and video degradation processing. Last week, I put a call out on Facebook to see if anyone had experience with the video side, and had a few replies with some very effective solutions. One of which was a Touch Designer environment+scripts, which I’m very keen to dig into once the semester is over.
On the audio side, I’m digging deeper into DtBlkFx, an FFT processing plugin which has been around for 15+ years, and has a delightfully obscure interface. I’m pushing myself to learn it properly though, as it not only applies to the future project I have in mind, but to some of the sounds I want to create for the final sound design specialisation assignment.
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Speaking of which, my work for this week has mostly been on that final sound design assignment. I haven’t created much in the way of sounds yet, but I’ve mapped out all of the actions, in order to create a loose idea of the kinds of sounds I should be experimenting with for the sound design. It seems like a huge undertaking, but I want to push myself to create something interesting, such as my idea to use an MP3 compression style effect to represent disintegration of a ghost. Initial experimentation isn’t working out too well, but I think I just need to change up my source sounds—I was using the sound of scrunching up paper, which I think is too harsh for what I want.
Another sound I’m very keen to get started with is a “telekinesis” effect in the video piece I chose. I’m thinking of making something inspired by the telekinesis sounds in Control:
It’s an excuse to play the game a bit more, but I think the sounds are great, and similar sounds would fit my sound design pretty well.
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Overwhelming installation
I had some incredibly positive feedback on the most recent iteration of my musical piece for Pat’s installation, which made me feel like I’m finally getting better at identifying emotions and building music accordingly. I still have some work to do on the additional sounds, but we’re on the right track.
Pilgrim animation
I haven’t had time to work on this since last week, but I had a chat with Grace about the new intro, and she loved it, so we’re going with that. This excites me greatly. I’ve been briefly messing around on piano every few days and have noted down a few chord progressions I’d like to experiment with for the ending.