I’ve spent most of today working with stems imported into Premiere, trying to set up a multichannel project for Pat’s installation. I had to look up a guide, and was almost on the edge of giving up, when it suddenly worked and I was able to send certain tracks to the “rear” speaker (a Minirig, more on that later). I think the next step is to see if that actually exports properly, and then get it to play back using the weird speaker/audio configuration I have in mind.
I had to get out of the house at some point though, and while I was out, I put on the Why We Bleep podcast, episode 29 featuring Hainbach:
He’s got some great ideas about texture, destructive processing, and unsynchronised loops/rhythms that I can learn a lot from. I’m usually quite rigid in my arrangements and sequencing, having only really broken away from that this year with various assignments, so hearing someone talk about keeping things loose and focusing on texture first rather than melody is a very interesting perspective.
Here’s something by a rather annoying YouTuber (why do they have to be so loud?!), but has sparked my interest in data manipulation processes once again:
The process in the above video isn’t great (especially since he didn’t figure out the correlation between pixels and wave data and as such couldn’t get it to sound the way he wanted), but it’s reminding me to use some image manipulation tricks in my sound designs (particularly the sound assignment for Adam’s class). I need to find whatever the OSX/Win10 equivalent of Coagula is and see if I can get some interesting results.
Speaking of Adam’s class, I’m digging through some inspirations for the sound design, and the telekinesis sounds in Control are quite close to what I have in mind:
I can’t quite pinpoint how they’re made, but I can probably get pretty close with a synth and some processing.
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The sound HDR candidate meetup on Wednesday was a fascinating and somewhat nerve-racking experience. I say nerve-racking because my impostor syndrome was in full effect; especially since I was the only one in the room not in a HDR program. However, it was awesome to be among other sound obsessives, and I even managed to squeeze my way into a conversation about vaporwave, which somehow led to the discussion moving towards generative music and the use of machine learning to create or assist in the creation of music, which ties into research I’m doing for my Media Cultures essay.
I need to push myself to get involved with more things like this (meetups etc, not Scatman John), because it’s one of the main reasons why I decided to dive into higher education in the first place.
David Thrussell had the complete opposite personality to what I expected, in a good way—his guest lecture was hilarious and very critical of many parts of the industry. Much like Franzke’s talk, I didn’t write anything down (except to re-watch The Hard Word and look out for the scene with the cars—oh, and all of the hillbilly music he recommended) but it was good to get another realistic perspective on the industry. I may have to get in contact with him and talk about Morricone some time..
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Overwhelming installation
I think this is going really well, and is quite possibly ready to go in terms of my contribution. I’ve spent the past week working on cute little audio events flying around the place, and as mentioned, learned how to set it up as a quadraphonic project in Premiere so we can have a speaker/transducer in the middle of the installation playing some of those embellishments, to give the impression of the sculpture itself making sound. I think it’ll be quite effective if we can manage it. As a contingency (ie. if the surface conduction transducer doesn’t work well) I have a small Minirig speaker which can put out quite a decent volume and can be placed under the sculpture without being noticeable. I’m heading to the black box again tomorrow to run through some things with Pat so it’ll be a good opportunity to test some of the technical stuff.
Pilgrim animation
Again, I didn’t have much time to work on the actual project file for this during the week, but I’ve been writing down some ideas and working out how to adapt the beginning piano melodies / chords into the end section. My current idea is to essentially keep the underwater section the same (except with the melody starting earlier as per Darrin’s suggestion), but have it swell into something more textural (thanks Hainbach) before the ending “reveal”, where a Mellotron choir sound will provide some backing to the return of the piano, playing a new chord progression, with the previous melody altered to fit. I’m hoping to have time to wrap this up in the next few days!