Further on from the last blog post I wrote detailing where I had got so far with my piece, I have now finished it and would like to share my final outcomes and opinions.

In my previous post I had just finished experimenting with the creepy, distorted laughter track that I am having loop for approximately a minute throughout the piece. I wasn’t sure about this track but I decided to keep it in the end and see where the piece took me. I also recorded a scream to play amidst all of the overwhelming noise and edited it in the exact same way as the laughter.

Here is the scream before editing:

As you can hear, it’s not much of a scream and sounds quite silly. After adding the plugins it sounds like this (you might want to turn your volume down):

Again, it’s quite gimmicky on its own and I’m not 100% sure that I like it, but it does contribute to general overwhelming sonic nausea of the piece.

I was quite unsure on how to develop the piece past its climax with all the noises, and I decided to let tracks fade away into the distance gradually, one by one. In the case of the looping coins I automated the track so that the dry output on the reverb would slowly go down in order to give a sense of it getting further and further away. I then also decreased the wet output later on to make the track fade into silence.

I also added a low rumbling sub-synth to add to the overwhelming sense of anxiety within the piece. I know that long drawn-out bass notes are a bit of a cliché that can definitely be overused within the context of sound art, however it is quite low in the mix and not a prominent feature of the track at this point.

One final element I added to the climax of the piece was a simple square-wave tone on the Retro Synth plugin on my DAW. Whilst recording it I slowly moved the pitch wheel on my MIDI keyboard up and down to create a slow siren-like tone. This is what the result sounded like:

After the climax of the piece, I decided I wanted to spend the rest of the piece having things gradually quieten down whilst still keeping a general sense of unease. Most tracks were gone by the 01:40 mark but I kept the low bass note and added some pitched down field recordings of my kettle and fan to give the sound extra texture.

I also bought in an extra element of white noise on Retro Synth with a slow flanger on it as well just to help keep the piece moving and not make it feel stagnant:

I actually really like this sound with the flanger and I think I would use it again on another more laid back piece as a more prominent feature.

I then had to decide how I wanted to end the piece. I decided to have the low bass note and white noise slowly fade away and I used the same trick on the background arcade soundscape that I used on the coins track, making it sound as though it was slowly getting further away. Initially, to end the track I wanted to use an outtake from my field recordings of the arcade, with my girlfriend saying “Yes, I won some!” at one of the penny falls machines. I tried putting this into the track, however I couldn’t quite make it work on its own with the noise gate and it sounded too clunky.

Here is the track I ended up not using:

The noise gate was too harsh and any higher threshold resulted in no background noise being cut out at all.

However, when I was just experimenting I put the track through the vocal transformer plugin and a large reverb and got a very interesting result:

I liked this effect and decided to see how it sounded if I put it in the middle of the piece with all of the overwhelming sounds, and it sort of sounded like someone talking on the very brink of intelligibility, but was still indistinguishable from the rest of the soundscape. I decided to keep it in.

To end the piece I decided that after everything else had faded away, I was going to have the menacing, distorted laugh loop one more time. It serves as a bit of a jumpscare, and as this piece is based on my social anxiety in public spaces, serves as a reminder to the listener that it is never truly over and always creeps back.

Final Thoughts

Now that I am finished with the piece, it seems like a good time to look back and reflect. Overall, I do enjoy the concept of the piece and the idea of trying to make a piece slightly grating and unlistenable whilst keeping its artistic merit has certainly been a challenge. The main concept of it was to mirror the severe anxiety that I sometimes get in public spaces when I am overwhelmed by the amount of people and sounds around me. I always want these experiences to be over as soon as possible and in a way I wanted to recreate that feeling through sound. It’s the most aggressive-sounding of my pieces yet with the use of harsh distortion on some tracks to increase the overall intensity.

There are definitely aspects that I believe I could improve though. I think the overall mix could be cleaner and better blended together – this is a skill I am looking to develop more as my projects go along. Throughout all of my pieces this year, the mixing has always been a point for improvement and I really want to refine my skills as I go along.

It’s the shortest of the pieces I have handed in so far, and whilst that is not necessarily a bad thing, I do feel as though I was slightly running out of ideas towards the end and maybe the concept wasn’t as strong as my previous pieces. Ideally I would have made a few pieces and seen what my favourite was, and that is definitely a practice I will be taking forward into the future.

Overall, although I am generally happy with the concept of this piece, I feel as though there are still technical aspects for me to work on in the future, which I believe is a good thing! Every piece should be a learning process.