Research
I’d been meaning to watch Tantacrul’s video on corporate music for quite some time now, so I’m glad I had the push to watch it for the course.
It’s a pretty hilarious look at the cliches of corporate music, and had me cringing at points, remembering the terrible corporate stock music my last full-time employer used in their internal videos. It’s also contributed to my chord progression and arrangement learning, as it shows certain tropes used a lot in corporate music—tropes that I should probably mostly avoid, unless I want to build up a ton of library music, or write a corporate music generator.
We also watched Tantacrul’s video on TV music. Standout concepts included reification—in this context, strong associations reducing music to a single literal meaning—and “archetype” music—using certain genres or musical elements to represent personality traits. Particularly amusing was the use of pizzicato to imply “dumb” or “cute” traits.
This week’s film viewing was Nobody, which was a choice my partner and I made simply because we had Gold Class tickets and nothing else of interest was showing (plus, we’re both fans of Bob Odenkirk). The film itself is ridiculous and quite over-the-top, but from a sound design perspective, it was quite decent. Much like in Atomic Blonde, there was a musicless fight scene, where the sound design was ramped up to the point of being incredibly brutal. Even the introduction scene of the film was nicely designed; a montage of repetitive everyday life with the sounds of boring activities arranged into a rhythm. Not the most original idea, but well executed.
And, for something fun that came up in my YouTube recommendations, some great insight into the sounds of Doom:
Obviously the sounds are quite dated at this point, but for 1993, the sounds were incredibly immersive, and the video shows that part of the charm is how degraded the stock sounds became once processed, which I assume was a byproduct of space/memory-saving requirements.
While simple, I think in particular some of the edits and processing of stock sounds (notably, animal sounds for the monsters) are pretty innovative, and these techniques are motivating me to process my own field recordings, as well as library sounds, a little more.
Learning
I’ve been diving deeper into Pro Tools—learning how to apply some techniques that I commonly use in Reaper, as well as getting my head around the keyboard shortcuts and exploring some processes I don’t commonly use. One example being send effects; in Reaper I usually only use insert effects, but my task for this week (Sound Design assignment 1 task 5) ended up being quite layered and necessitated the use of a reverb send effect, as opposed to applying an individual instance to each channel.
My learning of more extended chord progression theory is continuing, mostly from Darrin’s recommendation of this Jacob Collier video:
It’s still a little mindmelting, mainly because Collier is such a ridiculous musician that I sometimes get distracted by how technically brilliant he is. I have saved it to refer to later though, and have picked up a few things from it, especially the parts regarding going up and down the circle of fifths and how they relate to major/minor chords, and the explorations of extended chord resolution. The section on chord inversions was also very interesting. I’ve been playing with chord inversions for years now, but it’s good to see practical implementations of certain inversions, as opposed to how I usually work, which involves as little movement of my hand on the piano as possible. After the video, I played with some inversions for the following project..
Project work
After what I thought was a quiet period from my collaborator for this project, she emailed me and asked how I was going with the music. Long story short, my email provider was spam filtering her replies to my previous questions, before they were even hitting my Gmail account. I apologised greatly, and got to work on the latest version, which can be seen above. I’m still not 100% sure if I’m hitting the right emotions that she’s looking for, but I think it’s a step in the right direction.
I still haven’t had the chance to work more on the installation project as yet. I’ve emailed my collaborator about it and she seems to not mind too much about a bit of delay at this stage. Still, I hope to get on to it during the week. I’ve had some ideas for it though, such as using some mechanical percussion to create a more physical element to the music; I’ll see if I can sort this out and still have the “vibe” remain positive.