Sonic Bodies: Reggae Sound Systems, Performance Techniques, and Ways of Knowing is a book written in 2011 by Dr Julian Henriques, who lectures in the Department of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths University, London, United Kingdom. In the book, he uses the Kingston (Jamaica) reggae sound system scene to explore the concept of sound embodiment, or, as the title suggests, sonic bodies, through an epistemological perspective of sound, based on the categorical concepts provided throughout the years by philosophers.
Julian Henriques suggests that one can think through sound and use the feelings and sensations in dancehall scenes to describe this affirmation
The sheer physical force, volume, weight and mass of it. Sonic dominance is hard, extreme and excessive.
Henriques, Julian. ‘Sonic Dominance and the Reggae Sound System Session’. In The Auditory Culture Reader, edited by Michael Bull and Les Back, 451–80. Sensory Formations Series. Oxford, UK and New York: Berg, 2003.
He compares the presence of sound to an ocean wave, where one feels emerged and in a total emancipated form of it. “The sound pervades, or even invades the body, like smell. Sonic dominance is both a near over-load of sound and a super saturation of sound. You’re lost inside it, submerged under it. This volume of sound crashes down on you like an ocean wave, you feel the pressure of the weight of the air like diving deep underwater” (Henriques, 2003)
Julian considers that there are many forms of expression, and sight is often seen as the major one, as well as written language, and symbols. However, sound possesses the same notation of understanding and lacks the need for pictorial representation or any other form of communication, such as music. These considerations were also purposed under a triad he designed, which analysis sonic bodies in the context of instruments of the sound system.
Henriques also divides sounding epistemologically into 3 categories:
Mechanical: as auditory propagation and specific sensory modality of audition, distinct from, yet integrated with the other senses.
Practical: as the basis for the techniques and traditions of a particular popular auditory culture
Theoreticall: as a dynamic model for both raising questions about the world
Sounding is a concept similar to Musicking (conceptualised by Christopher Small) defined by the author as something that “requires kinetic movement, with the corporeal agents of sonic bodies”, and englobes everything that entails its production and scene, from the crew to the social culture ambient.
I’ve met Rita Majek and Lauren Descher, the game developers, on the 17th of February on Zoom Call, which Cai Pritchard, the other sound designer, participated in. They’ve sent us a list of documents full of references and ideas for the project beforehand.
The game will be called Virtual Affects – a term fusion with Virtual Reality and Visual effects – and the main idea is to make a VR interactive game where the player has sources and ways to make him calmer, throughout a meditative and fun experience
Rita Majek & Lauren Descher
We aim for the experience to be mindful, relaxing and be a sense of relief for the the user. Specifically for those with mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression. Our experience has three different scenes, three portals that will take you to different environments. We want each environment to leave the user feeling either FREE, ENERGISED OR CALM.
Hence, the game is set in a way of making the illusion of an escapism scenario, where the player can heal and enjoy visual effects and haptic mechanics. For that, they divided the game into 3 scenes: Winter wonderland, Trippy scope, and Zenrapy.
For the different “worlds”, there are different things the player can do: in the Winter Wonderland, it can throw snowballs, in the Trippy Scope it can fly, and in the Zenrapy to draw. Collaterally, the player is invited to go through different exercises in the different worlds: writing down one’s worries, breathing exercises, and stretching. The player would be also accompanied by a penguin.
In terms of sounds needed, it was quite eclectic. Firstly, some environmental sounds (as they were called) were necessary to set the character into different locations: wind and leave sound for the Winter Wonderland, and waterfall sounds for the Zenrappy. In the Trippy Scope, however, there were no ambiences, but only music. Apart from this, it wasn’t demanded anything more important rather than some minor sound effects and voiceovers for the penguin.
In the meeting, it was done task management and it was decided that Cai would do all the sound design for the Winter Wonderland, Elliot for the Zenrapy, and the Trippy Scope. I didn’t take this decision, because of my absence from the first meeting to a calendar mistake. However, I was up for the challenge and I wanted to prove myself I can adapt to different scenarios. I am not a musician, and I don’t understand anything about music theory or how to play an instrument, but I do enjoy doing genre research and getting myself very deep in the process of listening to a specific subgenre.
In the meeting, they showed me their references for the music, and they mostly represented synth-wave and vapourware. It is definitely not the genre I’m interested in, but I consider it to be fun to produce and investigate.
The essay in analysis, written by Dr Constance Clasen, a cultural historian who specialises in the History of Senses, talks about the concept of anthropology of the senses by explaining what it means and what it represents in academia, and which ways are taken now.
She introduces the paper by affirming the necessity of unwesternisation of the perspective of the senses, referring that we (westerners) perceive the world as one of the many possibilities of ways, and should not be seen as the only and most advanced one. She compares, how many cultures use sight to describe social relations.
in “Foundations for an anthropology of the senses”
Within Western history we find, aside from the customary grouping into five senses, enumerations of four, six or seven senses described at different periods by different persons. Thus, for example, taste and touch are sometimes grouped together as one sense, and touch is sometimes divided into several senses
This affirmation is supported by a breakdown of three assumptions that society over the senses, and on which Constance considers to be the impediments that a scholar must fight for. They are:
Senses are precultural: Senses aren’t “purely biological in nature (…)”. Social codes is proof of this affirmation, and Classen uses the example of sight in different cultural contexts – “To stare at someone may signify rudeness, flattery or domination depending on the circumstances and the culture. Downcast eyes, in turn, may suggest modesty fear, contemplation or inattention”.
“Sight is the only sense of major importance”: this is what anthropology of the senses mostly argues about. “Sight came to distance itself significantly from the other senses in terms of cultural imortance only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centures, when vision beacame associated with the burgeoning field of science” and it was even more exalted with Darwin and Freud.
The perspectives of some anthropology scholars: scholars like Marshall McLuhan and Water Ong, argue that the “sensory model of a society is determined by a its technologies of communication”.
While reading this part, I thought about how art nowadays focuses more on sight than on the other senses. On the PDF I noted: “This article destroys most of the arts lectured in this collage”. The film is one of the arts that was already addressed by Jacques Rancière, who postulates against the supremacy of image over sound, and the other senses.
It is also interesting, to understand whether this perspective could be applied in our practice as sound artists. Taking the work of Francisco Lopéz and Pauline Oliveros into consideration, these two teach us how to enhance listening and also try to differentiate the terms to listen and to hear. It makes me conclude, that sound art is a neo-western reflection of sound. It also takes me back to my research for sound installation where I was trying to connect both senses of touch and hearing, which has a fundamental scientific investigation done by the Acoustical Society of America.
She started to develop the S1 in 2014 in space, where she would do shows. “Many of the questions that I ask now, I wouldn’t ask back then (…)”. Some exhibitions:
Emily Jones: Orange Action Clinic (2015)
Justin James: Reed Shining Bodies (2015)
Marisa Jezak
Tony Hope
Coast2c New Year’s Eve (2015)
Birch Cooper Ornamental Hypergate Conglomerate (2016): first time doing a generative piece, where Cooper would build his synthesizers.
Grouper (2016) was a slightly derivated form of the show to showcase experimental noise music. “The energy in the space was excellent (…)”.
Rachel Malin & Raque Ford: Raquel Raquel (2016).
Synth Library (2016). “Alisa Derubis approached me to build a space with synthesizers: ‘I can go to expos and bring stuff back(…)‘“. It was a space dedicated only to use the libraries, the same way a book library works, where you can use the synths to explore and obtain new practices or knowledge. Every synthesizer would have a patch synth so one can learn the synth profoundly. People that attended: The Creatix, Wizard Apprentice, Julius Smack.
Around the same time, she started working with Moog – “I don’t particularly appreciate being told what to do, but I had to put capitalism aside and make sure I could provide the artists I was working with the gear they need to create artworks (…)“.
In 2016, Ghostship hosted a show where a fire took place, and many people died. “It was a very physical period. Many of my friends died. It changed our community forever. Nothing was the same after that. We were so traumatized.My flatmate was getting sued by many families (…)”.
FILE – This Dec. 3, 2016 file image from video provided by KGO-TV shows the Ghost Ship warehouse after a deadly fire that started late Friday swept through the Oakland, Calif., building. The fire killed dozens of people during a electronic dance party as it raced through the building, in the deadliest structure fire in the U.S. in more than a decade. For those who survived, it was largely a matter of luck that when the first cries of ìfireî were heard, they were able to find their way through smoke and darkness or were near enough to a door or already outside. (KGO-TV via AP, File)
NYTCREDIT: KGO-TV, via Associated Press
Outside of their space, she taught in different projects: Moog Workshop (LA) and Kontaktor Festival (Latvia). “I’m proud of the outcome that S1 took. A no-budget production that allowed many artists to blossom (…)”.
In 2018, they were working with the Wysing Art Centre to collab in an exhibition called More of an Avalanche. Also, she collaborated with Keyon Gaskin in a show called Subharmonic.
She abandoned S1 and supported Coaxial Arts in 2020, where she participated in a fundraiser. Before moving to Berlin, she lent some of her gear that she wouldn’t eventually use in LA, which is still on – Feminist Synth Lab. Later she started working on a new sound piece called EROTIKA 25. She was 30, and it was her first time leaving the continent. She performed in Latvia and other places – “I have to stop being a baby, and I should put it in the radio. Now it’s a permanent piece of living in the online world (…)”. She moved to Berlin, and she found out she had cancer. She burned out.
“This day, I woke up in the hospital and thought, ‘I’m going to die. Yesterday I was doing loads of things, and now I’m dying.I’ve to take time, be at my body and heal. But it was hard. I kept second-guessing who I have all the time (…)'”.
During the pandemic, she released Sweet Hour (Enmossed x Psychic Liberation). It was the first she decided to use ASMR within sound. I’m ready to release more. In 2021, she released Fringe through Ecstatic Recordings. In 2020, it was a platform waiting to be released she designed it with a finish synth company, which focuses on the idea of manipulating ASMR – they named the project/platform AMQR.
People Like Us, or Vicky Bennet, has been a media artist since 1990/1991, but it wasn’t something she considered doing in the first place. She studied Fine Arts in Brighton in the 80s, and a course like this was pretty rare because you could work with time-based media. She started using Hifi that she would find at home, and by that time, sampling was pretty regular considering the dance and hip hop culture was taking place simultaneously. She had with her:
a double cassette tape
a mixer
Tv set
VHS video player
Radio tuner
She started doing mixtapes and sharing them with other people because everyone was doing them back then. There was no commercial purposes, only fun. The first outlet was radio, however. After submitting one of her tapes, festival Radio (Brighton) gave her a show. She later started working in a Sussex radio called Southern CountiesRadio. She made radio shows out of the radio – “I would use my double cassette tape and record the radio the whole day without listening And when once I had a pile of tape, so I go through them and start making bits out of them and little radio pieces”. From this came out the piece Millennium Dome.
Reusing ideas is the core of her work which resonates a lot with the musical genre plunderphonics. It’s a genre developed and conceptualised by the Canadian John Oswald. I set myself to listen to the most relevant plunderphonic albums ever made, ending up with more than 60 albums.
In his essay Plunderphonics or Audio Piracyas a Compositional Prerogative, John Oswald refers to the Experimental compositional technique of utilising and manipulating pre-existing audio sources to create a new composition like Sound Collage. The only difference between Sound Collage and Plunderphonics is the sample recognition, whereas, in the latter, it is intended to be recognised by the listener.
John Oswald describes the practice by pointing to the digital sampler as the composition vehicle compared to the traditional method. In contrast, the piano is the centre of the piece. Ex.: Hip Hop’s composition vehicle is vinyl scratching and vinyl sampling. However, music containing samples and sample-based plunderphonics is still in radically different fields. Plunderphonics is driven almost entirely by the sonic desires of the composer, using the samples as an instrument, as opposed to using them as an added extra.
Another theme discussed in the essay is whether using these samples can be considered stealing or not. He justifies it wrong by mentioning the many times rock bands would copy other bands’ sounds and finishes with a Stravinsky quote: “A good composer does not imitate; he steals”.
Ex.: James Tenney’s Collage #1 (Blue Suede) is a Tape Music manipulation of Elvis Presley’s “Blue Suede Shoes”.
“Blue Suede Shoes” was borrowed from Carl Perkins, who composed it originally.
I am still listening to plunderphonic records by this day, but I’ve narrowed down the list for those who are interested in the genre:
The Avalanches – Since I Left You (2000)
John Oswald – Plexure (1993)
Panda Bear – Person Pitch (2007)
The Rockwood Escape Plan – Dreamcast Summer Songs (2009)
Ground Zero – Revolutionary Pekinese Opera (1996)
father2006 – White Death (2015)
Oneohtrix Point Never – R Plus Seven (2013)
The Caretaker – An Empty Bliss Beyond This World (2001)
Stock, Hausen & Walkman – Giving up With Stock, Hausen & Walkman (1993)
I want to proceed with my extensive investigation of Giacometti’s work for this unit. I am neither a musician nor understand music theory, and I feel like Michel, as he would have to recur to Lopes-Graça, a musicologist, to justify his ideas. Still, I can be more critical of his work and practices under new perspectives and broaden it to new horizons. Still, I don’t want music to be the centre of my focus in my case. I see traditional music as a consequence or a response to what happened in Portugal during the Estado Novo era. I want to explore something I didn’t have time to do in the audio paper – the politics of voice documentation, the politics of the voice, the methodologies of an ethnomusicologist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3F0G3IZA6OI
There are many ways of analysing Giacometti’s work, which brings us back to the first audiovisual documentation of humanity. The first documentary film, Nanook of the North, directed by Robert Flaherty in 1922, was later criticised for his biased perspective on the indigenous Inuit people. Flaherty is a white, westernised man depicting his view on these people – do the Inuit feel represented there? The same can be applied to Giacometti. Yee Thong Chai (Toby), my secondary lecturer in this module, recommended me a chapter from the book Decolonising Methodologies by Linda Tuhiwai Smith, who goes through this topic.
On the other hand, I am more inclined on researching different areas of analysis, such as the politics of the voice. “The act of lifting a microphone towards the individual to empower his voice” is the argument that I raised on my previous audio paper but couldn’t reply to due to insufficient information. However, I knew where I could get that information. I had on my hands. The ethnographic researcher Salwa Castelo-Branco, an Egyptian Portuguese woman, currently working in the Ethnography department in Universidade Nova de Lisboa, talks about it in two books, Music in Conflict and Vozes do Povo, which talks about the methodologies on registering voice and traditional music. Also, other writers recommended by my lecturer Dr Annie Goh, such as Adriana Cavarero, will do further research and consider whether it suits my fundaments.
Since my teenage years, I’ve been in touch with games. The first game I remember playing was Frogger 2 for Windows XP, a kid’s game where the main character is a frog, and the player has to help him get their sibling’s stollen by a crocodile. I quickly searched Wikipedia to read the storyline because I didn’t remember. However, I remember Frogger’s voice and some particular sound effects. It is interesting to see how can sound designers make iconic that will stick to your mind forever.
Later at 12 years old, I found out about Minecraft, a well-known game played massively worldwide. Minecraft is a unique game for me to this day. As I grow older, I look back on my game experiences and recognise how good the game is. As a sound art student, I realise how good the soundtrack is, and it triggers my nostalgic memory every time. It also seems like the game nowadays has more artistic appreciation than five years ago. For instance, the website Rate Your Music has made an official compilation of the Best Video Game Soundtrack, and Minecraft appears at the top and for the public’s rating and reviews.
When I got older, I started enjoying horror games, mainly because the gamer YouTuber Pewdiepie was making it popular. Outlast (2013) and Amnesia: The Dark Descent (2010), and other games, were among my playlist, and even though my gameplays wouldn’t consider sound design, I acknowledge nowadays how important it is for the main experience. Amnesia established most horror games’ stereotypes, primarily through sound. Back then, I was so mesmerised by the game that I wanted to know everything about the development, and it was there where I first came across such thing as sound design. There was a video on youtube uploaded by the same company who made the game, Frictional Games, where it shows Tapio Liukkonen doing field recordings for the soundtrack. As a 14-year-old, I didn’t know what to think about all that. It took me four more years to understand sound as a creative and artistic practice.
My interest in sound design was born and nourished in Madrid, and even being very focused on cinematography and sound for film, I kept an eye on games. By that time, I was playing Alien: Isolation (2014), one of the best games I’ve ever played. This time I was already making questions about sound: How can sound be so terrifying? I can’t go through any corridor without having my heart pumping at 130bpms! The sound of the alien walking in the game is scarier than its appearance – this is a fantastic technique explored by Hitchcock as well – There is a distinct difference between “suspense” and “surprise”.
The world of video games was always of interest to me, especially concerning sound. Collaborations are not a new practice for me, but I was very excited to start this one because I’m gathering to make a VR interactive game sound with other people. It seems that I can also help the game developers tell stories with sound.
This document represents a fraction of all my research. The terms in bold are the topics that I’ve done further and extensive research on.
Borns in Corsica, 1929. He studied in Paris and became an ethnologist (as a student, Giacometti was quite active with his political speech during this time). Works at Musée de l’Homme (as an ethnologist, his curriculum was already fascinating at 26. Fell in love with the Portuguese, Isabel Ribeiro.
1958: discovers Kurt Schindler’sand Rodney Gallop’s testimonials on Portuguese ethnic music and culture and becomes obsessed.
Kurt Schindler’s Recording from 1932 Se tu quiés quet’anrrame la puorta in Trás-os-Montes
1959: He was diagnosed with tuberculosis and moved permanently to Portugal by his doctor’s recommendation. I’ve found some other details about his health state after 1974 when he referred to how difficult it was for him to undertake his practice while being almost incapable. In another interview in 1984, he said that his health state allowed him to register every ethnic phenomenon all over Portugal. However, from the 80s till his death, Giacometti was almost forgotten, and most of his expeditions turned into solitary battles).
February: First sound collection in Bragança.
1960: w/ Fernando Lopes Graça (he would rarely follow him, but he was “the music connoisseur who advised Giacometti, and who made the musicological study of the themes”, according to musicologist Mário Vieira de Carvalho) founds the first-ever Portuguese Sound Archive. Together they edited two dozen phonographic collections: Anthology of Portuguese Regional Music.
Fernando Lopes-Graça.
The anthology became famous under the tag of Serapilheira Discs, referring to the type of material that the cover was made of
1961: Giacometti collaborated with the legendary Portuguese sound technician José Fortes.
1962: Realises ethnographic series with Radiotelevisão Portuguesa‘s (RTP)* production, entitled O Alar da Rede (there’s no direct translation of this phrase, but it is an Algarvian expression that stands for net pulling.
*it is crucial to understand RTP’s positionality during this period
1963: Realises Rio de Onor: uma reunião do conselho. A film about town meetings in a remote village of Trás-os-montes
1963: Beginning of production of radio programs** for the Emissora Nacional (Portuguese’s statal radio broadcast), Radio France, BRT, WDR, Sveriges Riskradio on traditional Portuguese music and its functions. It lasted until 1983.
**There’s no information about these programs. They might have been stored in the Portuguese Sound Archive at Torre do Tombo (The National Archive), which I already contacted. It would be interesting if I could work there on my DSP year.
**However, after researching a little bit, I found out that an old Emissora Nacional’s archive in Pegões, Setúbal, was abandoned in 2011. In 2018, reporters found rare Giacometti vinyl recordings broken on the sight.
1970: The beginning of producing a documentary series that would later become a consecration: People who sing(original: Povo Que Canta), directed by Alfredo Tropa.
Cantinela da Pedra, meaning the Song of the Rock, a work song performed to “enchant blocks of stone and make it lighter”.
Fragmentos de um Inquérito em Salir. A man interrupts the episode to tell his stories
Campaniça Guitar. An incredible encounter with a campaniça guitar player. The camera closes up to him, and Giacometti stands next to him, listening.
1972: Integrates the team of researchers at the Faculty of Arts of Lisbon – Geography Institute and develops the Line of Action for the Collection and Study of Popular Literature, culminating in 1982.
1975: Structures theWork and Culture Plan for Students of the Student Service (Recovering Portuguese culture, an objective for students of the Civic Service). He was part of the FNAT (a fascist institution National Foundation for Joy at Work, in Portuguese, Fundação Nacional para a Alegria no Trabalho) Reorganization Commission, later replaced by INATEL (National Institute of Telecommunications), and proposed the creation of theWorker-Farmer Documentation Center (CDOC, Centro de Documentação Operário-Camponesa)
Giacometti taught his recording techniques on a massive instructional workshop taken in 1975 before the beginning of the expedition in August of the same year. More than 200 young students participated in this lecture and later went all over the country to record and interview people.
1981: Edits with Lopes-Graça, and with the support of Círculo de Leitores, the Cancioneiro Popular Português (Portuguese popular songbook). He sells his collection of musical instruments and ethnographic objects to the Municipality of Cascais, and the latter later founds the Portuguese Music Museum at Casa das Verdades de Faria, in Monte Estoril.
1984: He sells the Portuguese Sound Archives to the Secretary of State for Culture, everything being found today in the National Museum of Ethnology in Lisbon.
1987: Inauguration of the Museu do Trabalho (Labour Museum), in Setúbal, where Giacometti collaborates in executing the exhibition O Trabalho Faz o Homem (Humans are made of labour).
1990: The last report on his work is conducted in August, in a campaign to Peroguarda (Ferreira do Alentejo), by journalist Adelino Gomes. On November 24th, he died in Faro. He is buried, at his request, in Peroguarda.
2010: On the 20th anniversary of his death, a commemorative edition was made with all his filmography: Michel Giacometti – Complete Filmography.
For this assignment, I will reanalyse the work of the Corsican ethnomusicologist, Michel Giacometti, during 1959 and 1974 in totalitarian Portugal and prove how his job didn’t just go through making an archive of all Portuguese ethnic music and folk traditions. Michel’s intentions were far ahead of that, which were maintained under the tag of abstract practices and subliminal messages.
When I first decided which theme I would research for this audio paper, I was pretty optimistic about the whole procedure. I started planning the month of October and November to make that happen. I
innocently thought that my research was going to be straightforward to make. However, the theme that I picked didn’t exist. The only information I would find was inaccessible, hidden in old academic archives, and sometimes even encrypted. The only credible information I had was belief. I believed that Michel Giacometti’s work wasn’t just a mere collection of ethnic music.
My first so far can be seen as a puzzle. If I couldn’t search things instantly, it would have to be by searching piece by piece and analysing every document I found as evidence. There was no information in English, which is concerning. Then I realise that neither in french there’s valuable documentation. Portuguese was the only language with available sources, and gladly I am Portuguese. I first started with the obvious. I read every single paper about his life and stay in Portugal. Then I began digging newspapers archives, and miraculously there were interviews about him from the 80s and 90s with actual quotes and beneficial information. Then I researched some Portuguese counties, which later did homages to Michel to see if I could get different sections, which happened four times as far as I’m concerned: twice in Setúbal, once in Cascais, and another one in Ferreira do Alentejo. The more I dived into the subject, the more I would find valuable information for my research. I began to understand how should I search this topic as a code that only specific keywords would trigger the info I needed. It wasn’t effortless to find material even under Portuguese-based searching.
I didn’t have access to all his sound archives. Publico and RTP, the national broadcast radio and television, have released all of his productions for 120 euros, with a compilation of his notes. My father owns these CD’s, but there was no way to reach him. Youtube had most of the relevant recordings I needed for the assignment, but not for the sake of the research itself. To understand his positionality in the whole story, I would have to watch and listen to his recordings and read all of his notes. I tried to listen to everything available for me, but it would take more than 24 hours to listen, and another 24 or probably more only for note-taking. I had to abandon this utopic idea and proceed with scriptwriting and audio production.
Script-writing was complicated. I had to narrow down my research into at least 1100 words (11 minutes). When I started writing, it was tempting to go back and research a couple more details about Giacometti’s notes, but time was consuming, and I had to make progress. I’ve looked at all my research and hand-picked which things should I highlight. When the script was done, it was too late to amend it. When I recorded my voice, it reached precisely 11 minutes. While editing, I managed to cut it down to 9, but that would mean I would only have 3 minutes of creative sound exploration and showcasing. Some things were inevitable not to extend, but others had to be censored from the audio paper. However, my final export was 12:59 seconds.
I had three options:
Cut down a big chunk of information and spend a lot of time editing and making it sound appropriate for delivery.
Cut precisely 11 minutes and explain later that there was more coming up.
Don’t do anything and assume responsibilities.
I picked the last option because I realised I didn’t even have enough time to complete my blog posts when I checked the clock. I consider that this type of occurring are crucial for educative purposes. It was my responsibility to submit work as it should.
When I submitted my project, it didn’t mean my research’s end. I’m too attached to the subject, and I can’t simply avoid all the questions I have that need an answer. I could later realise I was wrong about Giacometti’s intentions, but I already have too much evidence about it, and I’m so close to proving my point. The realistic timing for my audio paper would be at least 1 hour, and I promise that I will be truthful to the finalisation of this research.
In the 3rd “studio session” of this project, I’ve dedicated mainly to editing SFX. In this category, three main subgroups are edited separately but mixed all together. Those are:
BACKGROUNDS/AMBIENCES (BG/AMB): sounds that build each scene’s location and consist entirely of elements, not scenes on screen. Some editors prefer to differentiate BGs from AMBs. The only thing that might differ is their visibility on camera.
HARD FX (FX): realistic sounds that are driven by what’s on camera or action.
SOUND DESIGN: elements that need to be created from scratch or a lot of processing to fulfil its function.
SOUND DESIGN
The only relevant sound design present in the film so far is the whisper. Nevertheless, I count the handy camera scenes as sound design, even though there isn’t a lot of processing, and it’s only a matter of layering the right effects.
It was pretty challenging for me to come with an idea for the whisper. First, I was working alongside the director to develop a scary sound full of layers and processing and chaos. It didn’t work well. It didn’t manage to fulfil the film’s ideas. There was too much conceptualisation towards that sound design, and in my opinion, Mario was too involved in the process. A movie is a product designed by seven departments, not only one – the director. I think that the idea of the Author film should’ve died in the last century. A film set is not a dictatorship. However, I’m not comparing that case with this one. Mario is a very ambitious audiovisual artist, and he wants to have a snippet of his ideas in all departments. The sound design for the whisper started to take a better form when I first decided to use this film for the assignment. This course is helping a lot to see the sound from different perspectives in a post-modernist way – decontextualising things from their original significance. It was the same thinking process behind the idea of doing silence design instead of sound design.
It doesn’t sound good, but these are mainly the director’s ideas.
The whisper is a sound that brings terror with it. How can I show that with sound? Is it by offering terrifying sounds such as screams, roars, gore sounds? Or is it something that is created through time and by little glimpses that are presented sporadically? Gary Rydstrom, while talking about the sound design of the first T-Rex scene on Jurassic Park (1993), he explains why it is so iconical and effective:
“That scene where the T-Rex shows up is another example of planning a scene for sound. I think other directors would have had maybe a shocking moment where you see the T-Rex suddenly appear out of the blue. Hitchcock would say that you can either show the bomb under the table and have 5 minutes of tension or have the bomb explode as a surprise and get one second of shock. Spielberg did great by getting several minutes of tension because you knew what was coming and knew it because you heard it before you saw it. It was cleverly planned to scare people that way. It’s nice when movies think about sound ahead of time.”
I introduced the whisper that way. The whisper comes in the very first scene of the short: We see Emilio filming the forest with his handy camera, and before the scene ends, we get a glimpse of this human-like sound from within the forest. However, the way I came up with that sound was by accident. I went through my sound libraries, looking for a background that matched the handy camera scene ideas – exaggerated and very detailed. I found one good atmos of a pseudo tropical forest with a curious bird sound that recalls a common potoo. I dragged the clip into the scene, and when I listened back, the bird sound sounded haunting and frightening, and it looked like it was perfectly cut without even touching it.
I kept listening to that scene back and forward, and it sounded so good that I didn’t want to get rid of it. I decided to use it. Nevertheless, I need more repetitions of that same sound. By isolating it, I realised it sounded like my colleague Travis Yu, a vocal performer. We analysed the sound, and we agreed that we would recreate the sound through his voice and hopefully, that will function and work well within the final scene. Travis wanted the sound of the actual bird, but we couldn’t find it. They asked me: Why don’t you use the bird voice instead of mine. I don’t know how to answer them, but I will use their question in future experimentation.
The rhythmic constant bird sound is a European turtle dove. The sound that I’m talking about is the one that sounds like a bird, a fox and possibly a human, difficult to miss.
Apart from that sound, I used two other elements. I liked the idea of minimal sound design already discussed before. So I used forest tones with maxed gain and accompanied with dozens of limiters that distorted the source completely. I’ve only needed a low pitch and high pitch from this experimentation, so I could later mix it creatively and enhance the story after the whisper’s appearance. In the scenes that proceed with the whisper’s appearance, I “crossfaded” both sounds with an HPF and LPF, resulting in an almost deaf and dead atmosphere. I later named the sounds dead atmos.
