When I first sat down to make a start on my piece, I actually felt quite stuck for ideas. I knew the themes I wanted to talk about, but I wasn’t quite sure where to start, or what celebrity’s story to start off with.

I decided to just get stuck in with something and see if it worked, which I find is always the best way to get the creative ball rolling if I’m facing an artistic block. I found an AI text-to-speech website – Speechify, which has quite a few examples of celebrity voices which you can make say anything you put into the text box. I decided I’d just start with a random well-known celebrity that was included on there, so I typed some gibberish in and had an AI version of Gwyneth Paltrow read it back to me.

After a while of messing around with the text to speech generator, I realised that it didn’t feel like a great jumping off point for me. Although it was entertaining to use, the more and more I thought about it I realised that I didn’t really want to write a script for this piece, which is essentially what I would be doing if I were to use this technology as the main focal point of my work. It would be similar to a radio drama, a medium I have enjoyed making in the past, but that I don’t feel works with the aesthetic of what I want to present in my final installation. I would like the soundscape to be more abstract and for people to piece together the meaning from the sonic and visual elements – having AI read out stories felt a little too on the nose for me. Of course the sound in the installation should be able to stand on its own and tell a story without the visual elements being there, however I feel like there are other ways I’d rather do this.

So, after realising I didn’t want to use Speechify just yet (although I may come back to it later in the making of the piece) I decided to again just get stuck in with something else without thinking too much about it. I had the idea of working with collage to help tell the story and convey the meaning that I want. Similar to how I want to use physical collage in the form of newspaper cuttings stuck to the wall in the visual part of my installation to fabricate fake stories about celebrities and distort truth, I decided that a sound collage could also help me create some parts of the story I want to tell, whilst still being abstract enough that audiences can take away their own meaning from the piece.

I downloaded a few celebrity gossip interviews and reports and put them into Logic to see what kind of collage I could make with them. I started by placing a report of Tom Cruises’s promotional videos for Scientology into my DAW:

I also downloaded the audio from a video from 10 years ago of Justin Bieber ‘lashing out’ at a member of the paparazzi (although in my opinion in the video it looks like Bieber is being harassed by a man many years his senior, he is only 19 years old in the video – another example of the press distorting reality):

I put the Tom Cruise interview through a granular synthesiser as an experiment; I don’t really have much experience with granular technology and have never used it in any of my pieces prior to this one so I thought I would try it out and see what results I could get. I think that conceptually granular synthesis also works with what I am trying to convey with my sound collage – it chops up and messes around with the original source material put through it to come out with something different, similar to how celebrity stories can be treated by the press. I used the free ‘Emergence’ plug-in by Daniel Gergely for this process:

I ended up going for a setting that didn’t mess around with the original audio too much, as I still want the audience to hear what is being said. It ended being a delay-type effect which I have faded in and out with automation. I then put the track through the iZotope Vinyl emulation plug-in and used the ‘1930’s’ setting to remove a lot of the low-end give it a telephone EQ sound to make it sound as if it is coming from a cheap phone speaker:

This is the finished result:

A lot of what Tom Cruise says in the interview such as ‘We are the authorities on the mind’ actually comes across as rather controlling and creepy, and I think the warped sound of the vinyl plug-in plus the delay helps accentuate that. There is also a moment later on in the clip that has a crowd cheering for Tom Cruise, but with these effects put on and placed lower down in the mix amongst other tracks it begins to sound like screaming, which is again distorting the original context of the scene that originally took place when this was recorded.

I didn’t really add anything to the Justin Bieber clip and am just letting it play out for now. It sounds violent and you can only really hear the swear words come out when people shout, everything else is quite muffled.

I also found a news report about Kim Kardashian allegedly breaking Marilyn Monroe’s ‘Happy Birthday’ dress at the Met Gala and ran it through the Emergence plug-in to make it much more abstract, however I’m not sure what to do with it yet so I’ve just put it at the end of the project and will think of a more intentional use for it later on:

I felt as though the soundscape was empty so for now I have used an instrument from Spitfire Audio to fill some of the sonic space in the background. I don’t know if this is a sound I will use in the final finished version of the piece, or whether I will develop a more complex soundscape to go under the celebrity interviews, but for now I quite like the creepy drone I have underneath the piece. I have been watching Twin Peaks: The Return recently, which David Lynch not only directed but also did the sound design for. I really enjoyed the ominous atmosphere created by the sound in this television series; it’s completely different from what was used in the original run of the show in the early 1990’s. It sets a completely different tone and atmosphere for the return and plays a very important role in The Return. The sound helps move the story along, with motifs such as the vinyl crackling sound throughout the series giving away small clues as to what themes/story arcs are being represented in scenes in which it is featured. Overall, I’ve found watching the series very inspiring for my sound work in terms of not only how it helps tell the story, but also the sombre, empty atmosphere it sets up. So, for the placeholder soundscape which I may or may not keep in the actual piece, I found a sound that was inspired by some of the sounds in The Return.

I used the ‘Glass Piano: North Star’ instrument on Spitfire Audio:

Then I ran it through the Emergence plug-in again, with different settings this time:

Then I put it through the Valhalla Supermassive Plugin to give it some space:

And then I ran it through the vinyl emulator plug-in again (this time on the 1970 setting) so that I could warp the pitch and give it a glitchy crackling sound:

And this is some of the final result:

I am very happy with the sound – it is moody and atmospheric and I’m glad that I’ve really come to terms with the granular synthesiser in making it. However, I want every sound I use in the piece to be intentional and somehow involved with moving a story/narrative along. Although I like the sound, I find it hard to justify it’s place in the piece other than ‘it just sounds good’. This is why I say it’s in the piece for now but I may make a more intentional soundscape in future sessions.

Having to come to the end of my first session with the project, I am sort of happy with it but I realise I still have a way to go. Hopefully I can start to develop more of a narrative through my piece as I get further along in the process.