Rethinking Sound & Music

Bradley McGrath - z5116584 06th of August 2018

SOMA3414 - Rethinking Sound & Music

Project Proposal

Concept Proposal

For my assignment I am looking to create the rhythms of music, using only sounds found in nature, to recreate chilled ambient music, as I feel this genre is more closely related to natural sound and rhythms than other genres of electronic music.

I developed a dark ambient industrial track, along with a sound environment based on dark ambient industrial sounds, for my sound foundations course. My music track was a good lesson in how in understanding rhythm using ambient sounds that can be used to express environment. My sound environment work was based on using modified electronic components of made sounds and samples, to re-create the sounds of a large outer space industrial cruiser slowing passing. This was helpful in understanding how ambient sound can be used to develop a new sense of space and place, but also how timing can be used to further improve the atmospheres that I create for my sound environments. (I have added these tracks to the Dropbox folder.)

For this assignment I would like to further on this concept by understanding and developing the space between music and sound. In this way I hope to develop my methods for the timing and composition of my sound environments.

It’s considering this balance that interests me for my assignment. There is a space where people search for rhythm, expecting to hear it, and I think that space where it’s still undecided, is probably a better place to try and understand sound, rhythm music and the emotional effects this has while maintaining a listener’s attentiveness, than listening to the extremes of natural sounds or highly digital chilled ambient music.

I will consider how natural sounds can be developed to recreate modern electronic music, along with how using electronic methods can be used to create natural sound environments, but I will also consider the boundaries of my own definition of sound, to try and determine when is rhythm in nature, music, and when is it not.

Concept Research

One work where I noticed this idea working was in the film inception, directed by Chris Nolan in 2010, where the sound effects team working on the film often seem to blur the line between music and sounds. While the sounds used for inception aren’t always representative of our natural environment, the sounds and music often blend as one single focused piece, then drift apart again throughout the film. They went to extreme lengths to collect foley for the film, and while I will be collecting natural sounds for my assignment, the film serves as a reminder that I might need to be creative in my methods for finding the sounds I need to achieve that.

Considering the extremes of how this project could be approached, led me to the Bio music genre, which refers to experimental music developed using sounds created by non-humans.

One team of artists who experiment in this field call themselves ‘Scenocosme’. For a project they called ‘Akousmaflore’, they were grouping together plants of different species and using their bio signals to resonate sound, recording the electrical stimulus, and then converting this into the different species varying sounds. The group defined this as music, like an orchestra playing a symphony. This makes me consider question regarding whether the sound was already musical, if nature was already defining its own sense of rhythm, set in motion by its sense of touch. Once the group were able to control the sounds of the plants, they defined it as music, although the sounds the plants were making could possibly have been rhythmic in achieving their role in nature before the groups human interaction.

Their arrangement of the sounds indicates what the group defines as music, one theory is that what we define as music, is based on our environment and upbringing. If this is true then the point of origin for any original definition, of a collection of rhythms and sounds being musical, would need to be the original creator of the rhythm. If nature is the original creator of the sound, then this could mean that whether natural sounds can be defined as music, depends on the original intentions of nature itself.

This may all be very philosophical, but I do think it’s interesting to consider there is a rhythm to creating a balance in nature, and that nature and humans, could have an inherent nature to find rhythm, to seek it out, to find rhythm wherever it can be defined as such.

While the answer is beyond the scope of this project, it is interesting to consider that humans and nature might be similar in the sense of being on a emotional rollercoaster of a well-timed, and well connected sets of sounds, that can all work together at any time to create an equally understood sense of music and rhythm, regardless of our environment and upbringing.

Despite the varied beliefs about what constitutes something as being music compared to sound, investigating the space between sound and music could possibly teach us something about how and why we respond to rhythm the way we do.

Concept Development

I will create a three-minute sound piece, the first part I will be investigating natural sounds and their composition in relation to each other, then last part I will consider chilled ambient genre music, to try and understand what makes up its composition, I will then use the middle part of my track to find a point of balance between the two types of sounds.

I will investigate natural sounds in my environment, with the aim to re contextualize it as chilled ambient music. I aim to consider the composition, balance and timing of natural sounds, while creating sound environments, to improve on my methods of using found natural sounds, to create a sense of rhythm in my media compositions.

I will use be using pro tools and reaper for my work and will be doing a lot of field recording. There will be experiments undertaken with my found sounds, to discover new ways of modifying these samples so that they can be utilized in chilled ambient music.

Further experiments will be to try and recreate natural sounds electronically, through the use of Pro Tools, and plugins such as reactor.

Resources:

Inception Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3A3-zSOBT4

http://www.scenocosme.com/akousmaflore_en.htm

Bradley McGrath - z5116584 03th of November 2018

Final Reflection

SOMA3414 - Rethinking Sound & Music

For my initial assignment proposal, I was aiming to create the rhythms of music, using only sounds found in nature, to develop the space between music and sound. While I didn’t accomplish this entirely with the use of only founds sounds, my direction change was relative in my experimentation.

Although it started out as a confusing project as I wasn’t initially achieving the results I was expecting and it wasn’t helping that I was taking myself in the wrong technical direction by trying to convert to reaper. I ended up happy that ultimately the time wasn’t wasted, and it did all come together in the end even if I was always a few weeks behind schedule. Mostly my goals were achieved, and I got a lot out of it, which was to consider the composition, balance and timing of natural sounds, while creating sound environments, to improve on my methods for the timing and composition of my sound environments while using found sounds, to create a sense of rhythm and balance in my media compositions.

I have discovered through all my sound courses that I can find sounds very monotonous very quickly, like everything is a laugh track, but this leads to an interest in new and unusual combinations of sound and in the effect this can have on ourselves and our environments.

You could be coming home from a great night out and a constant musical element throughout, has attuned you to rhythm. You tap your hand against the rail of the seat as the train clack clack clacks along the joins in the tracks. What I find most interesting is that I might not have noticed these naturally occurring or manmade sounds as rhythm on my way out that night, but they are very clear on the way home, so the only change to the sounds and the roles they play is that produced by my own perception of it, and that change can be quite dramatic.

These kinds of sounds have a way of only becoming beats when you allow them to, through direct observation of them as rhythm or associated with rhythm, and that this effect can be bought about at any stage by introducing an instrument of rhythm into the sound environment intentionally, to draw the listeners focus to the natural sounds as a que to begin hearing them as a rhythm.

The sound of a whale’s call could be associated along with a variety of other sounds such as a piano note in the right tones, wind instruments, wind, howls, voices, or anything with a fair amount of reverb, to name a few possibilities. We can also call on the emotional connection to the sound by introducing sounds from the ocean. These new sounds can easily become part of a rhythm, drawing the whales call into its music.

Once you have the attention of the listener though, drawing back the attention to the sounds of nature as non-rhythmic, needed some sort of separation from the rhythm. I found that to do this I needed an extended period of elements that went against previous relationships or associations that I had earlier created between the sounds. A sudden sound that didn’t belong, a quick short change in direction followed by our new natural sound, were some of the ways I attempted to change direction for the listener.

I was trying to get myself setup to work on sound effectively at home to allow myself more time to focus and learn new things in my chosen DAW. This presented its own set of issues and I felt like I was going backwards for awhile. I did eventually settle on Pro-Tools even after all my resistance.

I was mostly creating my sounds using the Biotek plugin from Traction as well as some recorded sounds. It was a good way for me to learn more about what I was doing to the sounds technically. This also made my final class remix a lot easier as I was able to re produce the sound I wanted quickly, compared to solely stumbling on to them through experimentation. Biotech was also giving me an easy way to consider the relationships between natural sounds and the plugins instruments.

I was able to input my own recorded sounds into the plugin as samples and was pleased that some of the combinations I was able to achieve were quite good, so rather than just using my own recorded sounds because I had them, I was using them because they were better or more suited to my direction than the Biotek initial arrangements.

I kept meaning to go back and clean up my rhythm to make it more polished, align it to a beat, at least use a click track, and I still mean to do this. The reason I haven’t for this assignment was because I found that by working with beats in an organic way, just guessing where the rhythm is in a sense, or simply creating it where I felt it belonged, the track felt more in keeping with the focus of my experimentation.

I liked the unusual nature of the work I was producing because of this and I was finding the combinations of sounds and relationships and the erratic timings were helping to create a track full of sounds that I found interesting to work with. My conclusion is that if I want to make some really interesting new sounds, whether it is musical or for media, then I should start by using or creating sounds that I haven’t heard before.