Week 1
Beginning the Bachelor program as an articulate was something of a “thrown in the deep end” moment, and as such the first week was a blur of emotions, in a bizarre web of impostor syndrome, confidence, confusion, and inspiration. The discussions were lively and dense, however, and despite sometimes feeling overwhelmed, I did learn a few things, notably about Michel Chion’s concept of synchresis; it was good to know that a name existed for this technique.
The first assignment was very much in line with my aesthetic interests. We were to select from one of Gina Moore’s animations and create a sound design piece to accompany it. The brief was left quite open in terms of approach, with the only guideline being that we were to pay attention to audiovisual detail. The animations that stood out most to me were the more “glitchy” pieces; I eventually chose Cafe Figures Moblur:
Naturally, this reminded me of early-00s minimal IDM and the accompanying abstract video clips of the time. I began revisiting some of those clips—in particular, Lucio Arese’s incredible unofficial video for Autechre’s track plyPhon:
While the animation and musical piece are much more complex than both Moore’s animation and my resulting accompaniment, Arese’s animation inspired me greatly to create a tightly synchronised piece of audio.
The process of creating the audio for Moore’s animation could have used some refining. I touched on it in my writeup, but for future reference, I’ll outline a few technical points here. The most frustrating technical issue I experienced was that the software I used didn’t quite allow the degree of previewing audio events and their relation to the video that I expected. If I were using a straightforward DAW it might not have been too difficult, but I wanted to incorporate some of the detail that only tracker software can efficiently facilitate. Unfortunately, the VSTi I used (Redux), doesn’t synchronise as tightly to the DAW as I’d hoped; perhaps there is a mode I’m unfamiliar with, but I was only able to review the piece in pattern-by-pattern chunks. Ideally, I’d love to work with a tracker interface where stepping through each grid position would cause a video to update in real time; this is something I’m keeping in mind for if and when my programming abilities extend to software development.
During the research for my piece, it was interesting to see just how much has been written academically about experimental / glitchy electronic music. I found that one of my favourite sound designers, Mark Fell, had written a small blog post on synchresis. I didn’t refer to the post in my writeup, but continued to explore his work, and found that he has written a number of texts; most notably, Patterns in Radical Spectra.
I’ve begun assembling a list of bookmarks related to this program, and my creative practice in general, and as long as I can get through the sometimes inaccessible language, I think they’ll be valuable texts for future reference.
Week 2
Gina Moore attended our class in Teams this week, and provided some positive feedback on my final submitted piece which can be seen below:
It was good to get some constructive feedback from classmates and lecturer as well. Particularly in regards to making the sound move in some way as the animation progresses; this seems like a bit of a challenge for such a short clip, but I can understand the need for such progression to keep things interesting.
Moore also has some great ideas and mentioned a potential collaboration between our class and hers, on an abstract VR environment. This is definitely relevant to my recent interests, as I’ve been hoping to get into audio implementation and sound design for VR applications for some time. In the end, I selected and submitted eleven pieces as possible textural inspiration for Moore’s students; possibly overkill, but I have created a lot of abstract musical works over the past twenty years, and it’s time I showed them off.
Friday’s class was quite a detailed discussion, covering many concepts and techniques. I found this session useful even in relation to the music I create and release as standalone pieces—in particular, the idea of gardens vs. ships in plays and film, where a “ship” style production has a definite progression, and a “garden” is more of a world that viewers can explore and find their own meaning. I had been referring to some of my more minimalist and/or unchanging works (my work z0 being an extreme/ridiculous example) as plains or installations, but it’s good to have another metaphorical word to use to describe the concept.
One other personally relevant piece of information from Friday’s class was a discussion about justifying unorthodox ideas. This is something I’ve struggled with when working with other people on collaborative projects in the past, so it was good to talk about it and learn about how to “convince” collaborators to give some of the less obvious ideas a chance. One key solution to this is to show examples of where other works have used similar ideas/styles and describe how it relates to the ideas presented for the new collaborative works. Similarly, learning to talk about my own work in more detail from a less technical, or even non-technical point of view is going to be one of my key goals during this program.