Audi advert contextualisation

I'd say this was the most challenging piece of coursework for this module. The fast-paced cinematic visual style of the advert demands not only music that's equally cool and contemporary but also sleek, high-quality sound effects to match the action on screen. For the music, I thought a crossover hard rock/dubstep track would be appropriate. All the guitar sounds including the volume swell, main riff and lead plug-in sounds were recorded in one session in the edit suite. To make the main riff edgier and more cutting, I added some high-frequency EQ and a bit of distortion. After doing a bit of research on how to design a dubstep wobble, I made the bass patch in ES2 and added distortion to that as well. The drums play a very simple pounding 4/4 beat, and those sounds come from samples I recorded quite a while ago.

The sound effects were created with a combination of Sculpture synthesis and manipulation of sounds from my sound library. For instance, the fluttering bird sound early in the advert came from slowing down a fan sample in the time and pitch machine, while the shaking styrofoam sound was created in Sculpture by adding a bouncing object and using the controllers to modify the position and variation of that object.

Other sounds include the chair falling, which is a mostly unaffected sample of a cupboard door I recorded. For the fan sequence immediately before the chair falling, I added heavy flanger to all the musical elements, making them sound warped and airy. This transitions well into the chair falling, during which all the instruments except the high guitar are cut out to provide dynamics and highlight the falling chair. Then, the instrumental kicks back into full force for the rest of the advert until the Audi symbol at the very end, which is marked by a single high harmonic note which rings out and ends the advert.

MTV indent contextualisation

For this project, I tried my best to make something that would actually be marketable as a short MTV spot, and in the spirit of Retromania and the seemingly eternal 80s revival, I went for sort of an 80s electro track. Given the light and bouncy feeling of the visual elements (Japan being in the file name also contributed), I wanted the intro sounds to match the cutesy animated visual, which I interpreted almost as like an egg quivering and then hatching. For the quivering, I used a time-stretched sample of a plastic bottle cap settling on a table with a pitched-up mouth gurgle loop on top, and for the hatching, a pitched-up finger pop against the inner cheek mouth sound (c'mon y'all know what i'm talkin about), all from my sound library.

Right on cue with the MTV logo, the kick drum starts the simple electro beat which is accompanied by a bouncy bass line. Once the colourful countdown balls start appearing, a syncopated video-gamey synth comes in to fill out the harmony. For the second egg-hatching sequence, I thought about trying to find a skittery, shaking musical sound for the quivering, but I realised that it wouldn't really blend with the musical elements that were already in place. I only did the hatching sound, which is represented this time by an ultra-bright chime sweep kind of sound, which I thought sounded perfectly tongue-in-cheek contemporary. The final visual sequence shows the countdown balls falling in semi-slow motion against the colourful backdrop, which I evoked with three extra synth lines. Two are simply looping a two-note sequence in harmony with each other to emulate a kind of mid-air suspension feeling, and the third adds a nice melody above everything else with an Asian pentatonic flavour a la mid/late 90s Aphex Twin.

Analysis of Sound Design in Whiplash

The recent lectures on sound as it relates to the moving image have made me listen more critically to all the layers of sound in film. Utilising this mindset, I'm beginning to notice the way sound and music can hint not only at the emotions of the characters but also recurring themes of the narrative. I recently watched the film Whiplash and noted a few interesting ways in which sound was used to reinforce the uneasy tone of the film.

As one might expect from a movie about a competitive jazz drummer, musical timing is a prominent theme, and there's a scene early on that plays at this theme in a clever way. It takes place in a rehearsal room at the music conservatoire where the film is primarily set. All the musicians are warming up as they wait for the instructor Terrence to arrive, a temperamental, impatient man who ends up being the central villain of the story. With the camera fixed on the clock on the wall, the musicians play a jumble of dissonant passages that crescendo, the tension ever mounting, until the second hand signals 9:00, and Terrence arrives exactly on time. Throughout the film, Terrence constantly berates and abuses his drummers for rushing, dragging and generally not being on his tempo, so the extremely tense buildup of dissonance that leads to his perfect timeliness is quite a fitting introduction to the character that also establishes the theme of musical timing.

Another interesting moment makes use of starkly contrasting scenes placed right next to each other. In the first scene, the protagonist Andrew is struggling to keep up with Terrence's unreasonably high expectations. He's in a small rehearsal room privately practicing his drumming, and what starts as him working up a sweat gradually turns into his hands bleeding profusely because he's playing so hard. Throughout this scene, the drums become louder and faster, and finally at their peak when the camera shows Andrew's hands bleeding, the scene abruptly ends and transitions to a restaurant where he's on a date and soft jazz is playing in the background. This sudden transition from the thunderous intensity of Andrew's drumming to the calm of an intimate date night was in my opinion a very effective juxtaposition of sound and the mood created by it.

Finally, one aspect of this film that I found really intriguing was its sparse approach to ambience/score. While most films rely heavily on frequent occurrences of either score or soundscape work to highlight a given mood, Whiplash rarely uses either, and this lack of background ambience creates an uptight atmosphere in and of itself. Instead, most of the score comes in the form of the band performing jazz numbers, and it's the scenes before these performances that are the quietest in the film. In these scenes, the only sounds are those of the performers preparing: reeds being adjusted, the shuffling of chart papers, chairs squeaking etc., and this evokes a sense of tension that perfectly mirrors the palpable anxiety felt before a big performance especially in such a competitive context.

Contextualisation for Graphic Notation Assignment

This post, much like my previous entry about the soundscape piece, is just a reflection of my own work and thought process as I work on the graphic notation assignment. For this one, I've given a lot of attention to the colour of each element as it appears, and I hope that comes through in the final product. For instance, the video starts and ends with a simple black backdrop which the more visually interesting elements are set against. I've used a single bass note to represent this backdrop, which other than fading in and out in the beginning and end, never changes in volume, pitch or any other parameter. I'm hoping the unchanging simplistic nature of this low F note evokes the consistency and colour of the black backdrop.

The next visual element to be introduced is a series of swirling orange lines that dance around in the middle of the frame for most of the piece. My immediate thought was to try to capture both the swirling movement of the lines and their orange colour against the black backdrop. I used the arpeggiator in Logic's MIDI effects menu and tweaked until I found a setting that seemed to fit the somewhat random pattern of the orange lines, and a dreamy bell tone seemed appropriate for the wondrous spectacle of the dancing lines. Combined with the low F in the bass, the arpeggiated bell sound forms a 7th chord with the added 9, which to me sounds very orange or red. 

Next is a series of white lines that scroll vertically down the frame at a constant rate. For this, I used a fairly simple EDM drum beat to evoke the rhythmic movement of the lines as they progress down the screen, mostly unadorned by effects to capture the simplicity and some might say sterility of the white colour. The drums fade away in time with the white lines, and they're replaced by a series of more orange lines which are vertical and remain on both sides of the frame but seem to pulse from side to side with changes in brightness. These lines are represented by a sustained minor chord panned hard left and right, but with an amplitude modulation effect in place to match the pulsing visual.

Eventually, these fade away as well and the drum pattern comes back in along with the white lines. However, there's a subtle difference in that the outlines of the orange lines are still visible within the white lines moving down the screen, almost like a lingering ghost of an element that had seemingly died. I debated whether this was a significant enough element to address in my track and ultimately decided in favour of it. To achieve this effect, I simply automated the volume down about 5 dB and simultaneously cut most of the lows and mids out of the frequency spectrum, making it sound like it's faded away but is still barely there in the background.

The final visual component in this piece is a spiky glowing blue kind of orb that appears in the middle of the frame. This happens in sync with the dancing orange lines fading into grey outlines like the vertical orange lines had previously done. Thus, the same automation treatment is applied here, but to signal the colour change from orange to blue, the arpeggiated chord also changes by one note. The 7th which was D# becomes E to make it a major 7th instead, and with the added 9th I think this one note change evokes the colour change quite effectively. To represent the spiky blue orb, a synth stab echoes this chord and is heavily affected by flanger and wah wah to capture the trippy quality of the visual.

Eventually, all the elements aside from the blue orb are scrolled down to the bottom of the frame and disappear, while the blue orb sort of dissolves into more basic splotches of blue before fading away and leaving us once again with the solitary black backdrop.

Me and the Blues

I've never been a fan of the blues. As a musician, of course I appreciate how important it was to the development of rock n roll, r&b, pop and thus a lot of music I love. However, there's just something about the predictability and overall feeling of most blues that rubs me the wrong way. Sometimes, if it's injected into pop music, I really like it such as in the Beatles' "Dig a Pony" and "Yer Blues." But otherwise, I've found that a lot of blues music seems to focus on the individual playing or singing style of the performer rather than writing musically interesting songs. Instead, most bluesmen improvise over the same repertoire of around 10 grooves.

However, I've recently found an appreciation for some of the very first blues recordings. After reading a chapter on James McKune and his role as a blues tastemaker in Listen Again: A Momentary History of Pop Music by Eric Weisbard, I thought I'd check out some of the early recordings mentioned which came to form the foundation of what's now called the Delta Blues. I was surprised to find that some of these songs were the most unique I'd heard in a long time. While one can certainly hear traces of the blues as we know it in these tracks, there's some really interesting songwriting and textural ideas that didn't survive into later blues music or any other music that I've heard. Also, the scratchy, warped sound quality I think really suits this type of music and makes it feel much more authentic as an expression of the African American struggle. Most of these tracks come from a 1962 compilation called Really! The Country Blues 1927-1933, which I've attached below along with commentary on standout tracks.

Really! The Country Blues

Maggie Campbell Blues: really nice guitar picking, a loose groove supports the vocal performance perfectly. The occasional tremolo picking reminds me a bit of latin music. Guitar riff has an eeriness rarely heard in blues.

Old Country Rock: deadpan spoken word vocal seems way ahead of its time, almost punk-like. Another interesting twangy guitar riff that's a bit haunting, probably even a little more so than the last track. 

France Blue: Some nice two-part harmonies in this song.

Devil Got My Woman: Probably the darkest blues song I've ever heard. So much despair in the guitar part and vocals. If there was a blues sub-genre in the vein of this song, I could definitely be into that. Usually, there's a feeling of rising above the every day struggle in blues despite the down lyrics. Almost like the music serves to represent the light at the end of the tunnel, but this song sounds like pure darkness to me, and as one who uses music to wallow rather than overcome, I can really appreciate that aspect of this recording.

Touch Me Light Mama: gotta love the weird groove created by the static, especially against such a minimal arrangement, which sounds like only vocals and harmonica. The vocals are really intense and occasionally become somewhat dissonant with the harmonica which creates a really primitive effect that I think is interesting. I'm not sure what's going on with the harmonica, but whenever the singer says "catch em" it starts to sound almost animal-like, almost like they overdubbed someone humming along with the harmonica, i'm not sure. Next to Devil Got My Woman, this one's probably my favorite due to how strange it is especially compared to typical blues. 

Undertaker Blues: Realy cool skittering percussion in this track.

Critical Listening

This page is dedicated to my observations through critical listening of tracks listed in the historical listening appendix of Andrew Hugill's book, The Digital Musician.

1. Pierre Schaeffer - "Etude Aux Chemins de Fer"

This piece has an interesting intro, featuring what I believe to be conductor whistle sounds. The first one: shrill, quite harsh. The second: almost comical, like you can clearly hear a human voice within it. The third reminds me of the classic whistle sound you hear in the theme song for The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, in addition to countless other Western movies. Following this intro is the start of actual train sounds. I find that it's difficult to determine if Schaeffer is looping some of these bits of train sound or simply capturing the repetitive, mechanical nature of the train. From 0:22 to 0:44, it sounds as though there are two distinct loops of equal time which both take on a sort of 4/4 rhythm as they repeat, although I think both are playing the whole time while Schaeffer merely adjusts their respective levels. Following this passage is several repetitions of a harsher mechanical thud, which almost sounds like someone striking the track with a hammer. This portion ends with a kind of static that I'm guessing might just be a rough edit in the tape. That Western whistle pops up again, very nice Mr. Schaeffer. There's a passage from 1:16 to 1:19 that sounds like he slowed down the tape at the end, as it's the same sound but clearly pitched down for the last repetition. I like the descending high whistle sound at 1:33, reminds me of a firework about to explode. There's a looping whistle sound starting at 1:52 that eventually sounds pitched down and farther away, a demonstration of the Doppler Effect perhaps. Maybe that's also the case for the pitch-shifting I mentioned before, although it sounds much more natural in the latter instance. The piece seems to come full circle at the end with another whistling passage, distinct from the intro, but giving the impression of a completed journey on the train.

As one of the first pieces of Musique Concrete, I think this piece perfectly evokes modernity. Not only is the musical style and methodology obviously innovative, but the source material, a train, is very much the embodiment of the modern age of mass transportation and high-speed. Perhaps the piece is even post-modern, in that it challenged people's traditional notions of what music can be and forced the listener to consider the long-term consequences of modern living with it's harsh, unforgiving train sounds, virtually devoid of the beauty heard in a natural environment.

Thoughts on Soundscape Piece Conceptualisation

For this post I thought I'd just do some free writing about the concept I have in mind for my soundscape piece. The basic concept I want to convey is the sound of my brain as it goes through a normal day in which I wake up, take a shower, go record different spaces for my sound library, come home, make dinner, do the dishes and eventually go to sleep and start dreaming. This concept is quite mundane at its core since it's supposed to capture an average day for someone like myself. I'm hoping that I'll be able to add some interest with different sound layers representing everyday stress and the act of dreaming. For instance, I'm thinking that the piece will begin with the droning sound of the fan in my room, followed by my alarm clock. At this point, sounds that will appear later in the piece/day slowly start fading into the mix, representing me thinking about what I have to do that day, but they never come to the fore since they're not actually happening yet.

 As my day goes through typical routine to the point of venturing out through the camden markets, these anticipatory sounds will remain a part of the mix while the sound of what's actually happening is louder and panned center. Then, once I reach the place I actually want to record, Regent's canal to start, I'm enjoying myself more, my head is more clear, and thus the mental noise fades to an almost inaudible level. The piece will then remain fairly simple and sparse, mostly highlighting the peaceful canal sounds of boats passing, water, and bird calls among other elements. I think I'll follow this in a similar fashion with some quality sounds I captured at Trinity Buoy Wharf. Then, the piece transitions into the journey home on tube/bus at which point the mental noise creeps back into the mix as I not only think about cooking dinner, doing dishes and and other chores but also remember what I've done with my day thus far.

Once I've done all my chores and I'm getting ready for bed, the mental noise fades away again as I clear my head to go to sleep, eventually reaching complete silence. This is where the piece really gets interesting as I try to evoke the essence of dreaming using only the previously heard sounds of my day, but with lots of manipulation. For this section, I'll try to make something very detailed and psychedelic that represents the strange fashion in which the brain recycles and jumbles our experiences in dreams. Finally, the piece will come full circle as the psychedelic dreamscape abruptly ends with the sound of my alarm clock, followed by the quiet drone of my fan.