Overall, I have found it difficult to make a piece that links to my chosen essay topic for this unit. The attempts that I made to try and get it to directly link to the topic with the AI text-to-speech bot didn’t go as I would have liked them to, but this might be because I was always a little skeptical that this might work. I wanted to try it because it felt like it would make the piece seem more relevant, however I feel as though I may have approached it with the mindset that it wasn’t going to work, which probably hindered that idea.

I’m glad that I got the opportunity to experiment with a method of working that I haven’t previously used in my pieces for the course before – that is, the improvisation with the self-oscillating pedals, which was a new technique that felt relevant to my practice outside of the university as a session guitarist. Interacting with my pedals in a way that made me see them in a completely new dimension, even thought I previously though that I had explored all of their sonic capabilities, was definitely an eye-opening and engaging process for me. Having said that, I do feel as though the execution of the final piece wasn’t up to standard for me and this probably has something to do with the lack of creative inspiration I had around the topic around the time of making it.

Turning the piece into an imagined soundscape that might make up part of a broader hypothetical gallery exhibition definitely did help inspire me a bit more though, and this may be to do with the fact that by far the unit I have enjoyed most on the course so far was the gallery unit we did last term. If I’d had more time I would’ve tried to arrange and assemble a small mock-up of what I think the gallery space may look like, however I had the idea for making the sound work part of a wider exhibition piece fairly late in the process.

Whilst I am happy with some aspects of the piece, there are definitely aspects of it I might change if I were to do it again. I would maybe record some more improvisations and perhaps have more of a creative mix between all of the elements. I will allow myself some forgiveness for this, as it is my first time working with mixing improvisations together. Due to the unpredictable nature of pedals when they are used in the way I used them for the project, it is difficult to plan out what sounds one wants to get from them before the record button is pressed. I think I’m happy to leave this project in the past now, as an experiment with a technique that I had never used before, and that I may take forward into my professional practice when writing or producing with other artists as a session musician. Ultimately, I’m not sure whether the piece really got across what I originally wanted to convey, and there are definitely other pieces I’ve made in the past that I’m more proud of, but I’m glad I tried something new.

After a period of attempting to experiment with layering the text-to-speech voice on top of the pedal improvisations, and using a few vocal transformer effects to artificially double-track the voice, I’ve decided that the two elements of the pedal improvisations and the bot voice are not going to work together well in the piece. The sonic textures clash, but not in a particularly interesting way – it just sounded amateur. I attempted for a while to make a piece just made with various ways of chopping up the text-to-speech voice, but I wasn’t very inspired by it.

I’ve instead decided to make the track wholly from my experiments with the self-oscillating pedals and imagine it as part of a wider hypothetical exhibition piece with props that help show the message I originally wanted to convey in this piece. As an artist and musician in London, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the intensity of the city, and I think the internal chaos of the sounds of the pedals wrestling against each other gets that point and atmosphere across well enough that I don’t need to add the text-to-speech voice on top of it.

I started by using the TARDIS-like sound as a base to add other elements of my improvisations on top of it. This sound, to me, represents the low-level of anxiety I usually feel when I’m in London – a sort of rumbling of the soul which can leave me feeling overwhelmed at times. After around the 20 second mark in the piece and began to add the gritty, fizzy sound that I posted in the last blog. The first two sounds compliment each other well and they create a low and rumbling, yet also gnarly and anxious sound that reflect the baseline level of anxiety I often feel in the city:

Next I added the sonic-screwdriver-esque sound that came from the wah and chorus pedals that I posted in the last blog. The desired effect of this was to make a sound that feels like a robotic fly is buzzing around the listeners ears, which is why I repeated the sound and had it pan from left-to-right.

In the last blog I posted a sound which I described as “really harsh high-pitched noise”. Originally, I didn’t want to use it as it sounded far too abrasive to have any real use in the piece. However, coming back to it I felt as though placing it above the sounds I already had in the piece made it sound like strange, uncanny tv static which I think has its uses in the piece – so I added almost the entirety of that improvisation as well. There’s elements of it that wash out really nicely into a big spacey white noise & reverb kind of sound. I got this effect from just turning the reverb knob on my holy grail pedal up to the maximum setting. There also glitchy pitch-changing noises that come from me twisting the harmony knob on my pitch shift pedal. Here’s how it sounded on top of the other tracks in the piece:

When mixing the piece, I’ve tried to keep effects added on my DAW after the original improvisations very minimal, as I want to stay true to the original improvisations I made with the pedals. The only instance where I changed it was on one track where I added a reverb to a chainsaw-sounding track I had made with my distortion and chorus pedals. This was the original:

And this is with the reverb:

I did this because it helped the sound slot more into the mix, whereas before it had sounded far too harsh to add into the piece. I turned the dry signal all the way down, and only kept the wet signal up.

Most of the piece consists of interactions between all of the improvisations. Some elements come and go, whilst the low rumbling sound always stays as a reminder of the underlying stress beneath my life in London. As I mentioned before, my intention whilst mixing the piece has been to keep as many DAW-based effects off the piece as possible. I think my intentions and emotions I put into the improvisations I made should be sufficient, and I don’t really want to alter them at all.

I’ve given some consideration towards the name of this piece; as an homage to Terre Thaemlitz’s ‘Meditation on Wage Labor and The Death of the Album’ that I’ve written about in my essay, I think I may call it ‘Meditation on the Fact that I’m Trying To Meditate but the Restless Nature of the City That I Feel I Have to Live in to Forge a Career in Art and Music Gives me this Horrid, Rumbling Feeling Throughout my Body.’

In terms of a visual aspect to the hypothetical exhibition I am imagining, I think I would like to build a very small space (enough only for one person) for the listener to crouch inside with the speakers. I’ve tried brainstorming a few ideas for how I might paint or decorate the space, however I think I would just leave it completely dark and close the listener in. This would add to the overwhelm that I am trying to get across, sort of similar to a sensory deprivation chamber but not quite to that extreme. If I had more time, I might mix the piece in 5.1 sound to add to the intensity in the space.