https://henrybrewer.myblog.arts.ac.uk/category/portfolio/

My ideas of what I wanted to do for this prototype portfolio project and the concepts I wanted to cover changed a lot throughout the process of realising the draught version of my final piece. I always knew I wanted to do something with celebrity caricatures, and the idea of a ‘Hall of Fame’ came to me very quickly. I had a lot of ideas about how I wanted it to look, and I was thinking about the concepts behind it too. However, as was pointed out to me more obviously by José, my project tutor, in our first meeting – I hadn’t thought about the sound at all. This is a problem I also ran into when I developed my first gallery installation last year, as I think I get more inspired when thinking of the aesthetic of whatever I am making before I think of how I want it to sound. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing, but in both cases it has meant I’ve hit a slight mental block when trying to think of a sonic atmosphere to put around my visual ideas.

I struggled for quite a while to think of what kind of sound I wanted to make. In my tutorials I discussed with José the possibility of potentially making it into a form of radio drama, with either voice actors or AI playing the part of the celebrities I wanted to make as caricatures. I did consider this and made an attempt at using the AI text-to-speech websites however I felt a little uninspired with this approach and I felt it was a little too on the nose for what I wanted to convey – I wanted more of an abstract soundscape that works together with the visual elements to create a world. Also, whilst I did want to tell a story with sound, I also wanted to leave it more open to the viewer to figure out what exactly the story was. Once I had decided to go without narration, my ideas about leaving the story abstract were further solidified through reading the research paper by Mariana J. Lopez and Sandra Pauletto on storytelling through sound, and how trying to present too specific of a narrative in this format can confuse audiences and mean parts of the plot get lost.

My ideas for the themes I wanted to portray in this piece also changed a lot over time. I originally wanted to either cover conspiracy theories of para-social relationships between celebrities and fans. However these felt a little vague. Then I read the book Hollywood Babylon by Kenneth Anger and I was going to make a piece about the darker side of Hollywood and the mistruths presented about celebrities in the media. However, I found it still a little difficult to think of ideas – so, I did what I usually do when I can’t think of what to do. I just start with something; anything. The theme came more naturally to me when I just started making the piece – it just came together. This was also partly inspired by a George Monbiot article that I mentioned in an earlier blog post. I decided to make the piece about celebrity gossip culture and how it covers up much more important stories and increases democratic apathy amongst populations – show in an academic article featured in the International Journal of Cultural Studies.

I ended up making a piece that comprised of a mix of mainly cut-up parts of celebrity gossip articles and dark soundscapes that signified the stories that can often be ignored by the public. For these darker soundscapes I included sounds of war, sounds of oil rigs and white noise, amongst others. I won’t go too into detail about the making of this piece here as I have covered this substantially in my previous blog posts, however I will reflect on how I feel about how this prototype turned out.

Overall I am happy with the piece. There are elements of it I’m not too sure about, but I think it mostly achieves its goal of telling the story in an abstract way. There is a clear beginning, middle and end – I’ve also composed it in such a way that it is easy to loop. Obviously for a gallery installation this is important as anyone may walk in or out at any time. This is actually something I had to continue to remind myself during the making of the piece – that I had to compose it in a way so that it would make sense even if someone came in ‘halfway through’. I like the selection of celebrity gossip articles I have used, I think they sound inconsequential and stupid enough to get the point across. I also like the way the piece fades out with all of the elements gradually fading away.

One thing I have noticed is that the piece sounds markedly better on my monitor speakers than on my headphones. It sounds full and interesting coming out of my monitors, however on the headphones it sounds a little flat. This doesn’t bother me too much as I don’t intend for anyone to listen to my piece on headphones, although it does highlight to me I still have some mixing skills I should probably improve on.

I also feel as though I could have been a little more intentional with the sounds I used; for the most part I believe I was successful in doing this, however I’m still not sure about the drone sound at the beginning of the piece. I mainly used it as a way to come unstuck when I started composing, however when I continue with this piece I think I will replace it with something else that is slightly more relevant to the theme. Other than this I think I was mostly very intentional with the sounds I used, although as I mentioned earlier I think the mixing could be slightly better. I felt as though my use of panning could have been slightly more engaging. However, there are times when one needs to pull oneself away from their work and call it a day, and I felt at the end as if I had reached this point with the prototype and I didn’t want to go further.

I will next focus on building the set for the piece, then I will come back to extending the composition, adding more elements and clearing up the mix more. Once I feel as though the composition is finished, I will then mix it into a multi-channel piece. Trying to do this as I am still composing will probably be too difficult for me as I haven’t used this technology before.

I am excited to see how everything turns out when I finish my full portfolio piece. This prototype process has already been quite long for me and I have changed what I wanted to make many times, however I am now mostly satisfied with what I have made. I look forward to building the set as this may inspire me to further explore the sonic elements. As it is all still very much in my imagination visual-wise this may be why it has been difficult for me to compose the piece at times. All in all whilst there are some aspects I would improve, I am still happy with the piece and the concepts behind it.

In lieu of being able to show the paper-mache heads (as I’m not using them anymore) I have created a couple of quick mock-up diagrams of what the installation will look like.

This first one is outside the installation, where all that the audience can see is the outside of the corridor, a sign saying hall of fame, and a curtain where the entrance is (you’ll have to excuse my drawing!):

The next one is of the inside of the installation. It is a view of one of the walls, there will be another (almost identical) wall opposite this as well:

This is only a diagram so of course not an exact representation of what it will look like. I am going to make a mood board for my presentation later this week to get across more of the aesthetic I am hoping to achieve. As you’ll note, I have 2 speakers in between the cutouts. I am aiming to mix in 5.1 for the final installation, so I will have the other two speakers between the cardboard cutouts on the other side, and maybe the other one hanging above from the ceiling. I am also hoping to have lights that change colour throughout the piece to represent the different themes being told throughout the story, however I will have to work out how to do this.

This piece has been much more sample-driven than any I have made before (with the potential exception of the one I made for Specialising and Exhibiting Element 2 last year), and it’s made me develop a weird sort of imposter syndrome. I’m generally used to generating my own sounds that I use in pieces, and while I have used samples quite a few times in the past, I haven’t relied on sound library sites such as Freesound to the extent I have in this piece. I sourced all the celebrity gossip articles myself and did my own processing on them, and I also generated the gloomy soundscape the piece starts off with. The only elements I used Freesound for were for the samples of oil rigs and war. This is because I don’t really have a realistic way of recording these sounds. I could try to recreate them through foley however I don’t think I’d achieve the same effect and it’s also not my strongest skill, I would probably have to collaborate with someone on it.

At times I felt a bit lazy using Freesound as I felt that I should be making the sounds myself, however I think the use of sound libraries is acceptable and doesn’t harm your artistic integrity when they are genuinely sounds you wouldn’t be able to produce otherwise and you use them in a creative way with other elements to create a wider piece. I feel that I have tried to use these sounds creatively and still added quite a bit of processing to them so they are not the exact sounds that I downloaded.

There are also whole genres such as plunderphonics that rely on using samples to create something new, and I don’t believe it’s controversial to say that artists in these genres are creating something entirely new from what they have already found, and they have the same level of integrity as any other producer. I think because my background before coming onto this course was in playing musical instruments, I didn’t have any experience with sampling so sometimes it can feel a little counterintuitive for me as I’m still, somewhere in my subconscious, used to playing and composing on an instrument rather than gathering lots of materials to make something new. However I’m really happy that I’ve developed skills in using and manipulating samples to effectively tell a story.

My idea for the physical part of this piece has always been to make paper mache caricatures of celebrities and put them into a hall of fame. Although this was not to be realised until after the prototype hand-in, I thought it would be good to make 1 or 2 caricatures for now as well. Although I had initially wanted full-body sculptures with speakers built into them, I realised that I may need to compromise due to time, budget and space constraints and just make heads to put on plinths. As the making of these caricatures is the only part of the prototype making process that isn’t sound-based, I thought I would leave this step until last as I really wanted to focus on the sound for this element of the project.

Yesterday, I began with the process of making a paper mache head. I can’t have done this for a long time, probably not since primary school, so I found a couple of tutorials online that showed how to do it. I gathered some balloons, PVA glue, newspaper and petroleum jelly and set to work.

Surprisingly, the most difficult part of this process for me at the start was just blowing up the balloon and tying the knot on it as this isn’t something I’ve actually done before, and I found it a bit fidgety and frustrating.

Once I’d finally finished with blowing up the balloon I put some petroleum jelly on it as the tutorials I’d found had said to – this was so the balloon could then be pulled out of the cast by the end of it. This proved to be a mistake and bit of a waste of my time though, as the balloons kept popping when I’d put the jelly on them. Eventually after 3 tries I decided to leave out this stage and go straight onto making the cast.

I dipped the pieces of newspaper into a mix of water and PVA glue that I had prepared and stuck them on to the balloon. This took a while but I eventually finished the first layer. I then left it to dry as I went out to see an exhibition (Women’s Revolt at the Tate Britain) and then came back later to add the second layer. Unfortunately in the time that I had gone out the balloon had started to deflate and the paper had come unstuck:

The layers of newspaper were all crinkled and came off easily. This meant I would have to start from scratch the next day – I was unsure if the same would happen again though, and I didn’t want to waste my time especially as it’s not too long until the hand-in date and preparing and painting these caricatures is a process that would have to be done over a few days.

I thought about my larger hopes and goals for the visual part of this installation, and I realised it might be best to change things up. I had originally wanted to have life-size sculptures in my hall of fame, but had to compromise and just make the heads as I thought the full body sculptures would be too time-consuming. However, as silly as it seems, I was finding the whole process of making the paper mache heads a bit frustrating, as it was still a lot of time and effort for something that was essentially a compromise and I was even still having difficulty with that.

What I realised I could do instead would be to just make some life-size cardboard cutouts. This means I don’t have to compromise on the scale of the caricatures I make, but it would also be easier and less time consuming, which is good as I should be focusing mostly on the sound for my installation. This is actually similar to the gallery piece I made last year, where I had a blank family of cardboard silhouettes sitting together on a sofa watching the same film as the viewer:

Obviously the cardboard cutouts I want to make would be a lot more sophisticated than the ones I made last year, and I would like to decorate them with collage to make them resemble their assigned celebrity but in a warped way. I think this could actually maybe be more effective than my original idea of having painted paper mache heads as it runs with my theme of collage and cutting things up to make something new. I’m not sure if I will have the time to make these before the presentation I have to give on the 12th, and it would be difficult to transport the cutouts to LCC, but what I may do instead is provide sketches of what I imagine the installation and caricatures to look like and show diagrams of speaker placement.

Overall I’m happier to continue with the cardboard cutouts as I’ve realised that the paper mache models might be more difficult and time consuming when I could achieve a similar affect and make life-size caricatures with cardboard. However it was still useful to experiment in the way I did so that I could come to this conclusion.

Since my last blog post I had a meeting with my portfolio tutor José, who listened to my piece and gave me some helpful feedback. He suggested that I needed to work on the dynamics and to potentially utilise sidechain compression to keep the voices audible above the rest of the soundscape. Whilst I did eventually want the voices to be drowned out by the violent loundscape, he had a point as even some of the clips at the start of the piece were being slightly drowned out.

I felt a bit nervous using sidechain compression as I have never used it before making this piece. I had heard about it and kind of knew what it did, but didn’t really know how to put it into practice. I looked up some tutorials, and eventually tried it out on my piece. Firstly, I created two sum stacks in Logic. Whereas before I had just had my all of my tracks kept separately, I now had two sum stacks that all tracks were sent into – ‘Voices’ and ‘Soundscape’. I put an emulation of a vintage optical compressor onto the ‘Voices’ sum stack:

I then sidechained it to bus 2, where the ‘Soundscape’ tracks were being sent. I had tried it the other way round at first, where I put the compressor onto the ‘Soundscape’ sum stack, and sidechained that to bus 1, where the ‘Voices’ tracks were being sent, however this didn’t produce the effect I was expecting so I switched it round and now the voices were much clearer to hear over the rest of the sound.

This did noticeably make the piece feel as though it was mixed better and it gave it a lot more clarity. I’ve always found mixing the most difficult part of the creative process as it can be quite technical and require quite a lot of attention to detail, so I’m happy I had a tutor to help steer me in the right direction.

After this, it was time to continue composing the piece. I started by downloading some more sounds to sample – this included some more sounds of war (eg. bombs going off, gunfire) and a few more celebrity news articles for me to place into the piece. I wasn’t quite sure where to start so I just dragged a couple of the war sounds in where I had left off and took it from there. The sounds I put in were very loud and boomy, and I think this helps solidify the celebrity gossip reports eventually becoming overwhelmed by the violent soundscape.

Above is one of the sounds I put in. As you can hear I also put this through the Emergence plugin, but it only left it on very basic stock settings. Below is a sample of gunfire that I looped the most intense part of 3 times round to prolong the duration, and then stuck through the 1930 sound on the vinyl emulator plugin, as I have done with some of the other tracks in this piece. This was because it felt a bit too obvious in its raw, unedited state and I felt that needed some processing to fit into the mix more. I’m still not sure about it as I fear it may be a bit on the nose but I might be overthinking it. One could say it’s as though the sounds that were portrayed as coming out of cheap phone speakers before (i.e. some of the interviews I sampled earlier in the piece) have been replaced with the sounds of violence.

I then decided to put in two of the news articles I had just downloaded. These were:

• A TMZ article on Real Housewives of Atlanta star Kim Zolciak getting divorced from NFL player Kroy Biermann. I remember this story coming out earlier this year as me and a couple of my band members saw it in the news and were wondering how we’d even seen it as it was so irrelevant and it became a small in-joke between us that we’d reference sometimes.
• An article from E! News on Selena Gomez allegedly ‘throwing shade’ at Kylie Jenner when talking to Taylor Swift at an award ceremony.

I put the Kim Zolciak clip into the track and didn’t do any processing with it. All I did was pan it to the left and trim it down a little – I kept the volume quite low as I wanted it to be mostly drowned out by the explosion.

For the Selena Gomez clip, I really only used a couple of seconds of it. That’s because all I really wanted it for was one sentence the reporter says – ‘Everything is not as it seems’. I liked the idea of using this quote as taken by itself it sounds quite ominous, and I liked the idea of this chirpy gossip reporter’s voice saying it as the piece winds down. In this context it is a metaphor for the real issues that celebrity culture gets in the way of.

I was also going to potentially use a clip from one of the Gypsy Rose Blanchard interviews, since she has recently been released from prison after being part of a plot that led to the murder of her own mother and is now (one could say) a celebrity influencer with millions of Instagram followers and TV shows about her life, however it’s a very complex story and I think I would have to tackle an entirely different set of issues to cover this, so I didn’t feel comfortable including this in my piece.

I decided I wanted the sound of TV static to rise up in volume during the violent soundscape to resemble communications breaking down being replaced by nothing, however I felt as thought I had been relying too heavily on samples for this project – I decided for this sound I would attempt to create it with some white noise in Logic’s Retro Synth:

I also added some distortion:

And I also added the Emergence plug-in on very basic settings just to put in a sense of movement. Here is the result:

On its own it isn’t wholly convincing however within the mix it works well enough.

As I alluded to a couple of paragraphs above, my plan for the narrative, at least for this prototype, is to have the sounds of the gossip reports drowned out by violent sounds of war and climate breakdown until eventually they stop as well and the audience is left only with white noise and the crackling with which the piece started. Not only does this allow it to loop nicely in a gallery context, it provides a narrative as well. I want the audience to really work this out for themselves and create their own intentions – I want to be deliberately vague. In my opinion, the eventually giving of way to only the white noise means that we as a society lost concentration on what was important partly due to media agendas, and let the world fall to pieces and now there is nothing left – this soundwork is potentially set in the future then. This would work well with sort of apocalyptic looking caricatures of celebrities in the gallery installation. The whole ‘Hall of Fame’ aesthetic could be a pathetic post-apocalyptic attempt to recreate and re-deify these celebrity names and faces. This is only my interpretation though and I want to people to have different opinions on what the plot is.

In order to wind the piece down into this static sound I began gradually reducing certain elements. The low soundscape drone that the piece starts with had actually stopped quite a while ago in the timeline, which I hadn’t actually realised, but I liked that it had stopped as it left space for a more eerie, empty soundscape of the white noise and a couple of other small elements. One of these was the report on Kim Kardashian allegedly breaking Marilyn Monroe’s dress that had been processed through a granular synthesiser to put the point where it was unintelligible, which was still playing out from when it comes in earlier in the piece. It was a happy accident to hear the celebrity gossip channel’s theme tune at the end, as above the white noise it sounded very creepy and mangled. I decided to loop the theme tune as it was only a couple of seconds long, and it sort of sounds like a broken record being stuck in the same place. I don’t know why I like it but I feel as though it helps add to the sombre, empty atmosphere at the end:

Whilst this sound was playing out, I added two final loud sounds of bombs dropping into the distance before pretty much everything starts to fade out. In my narrative this marks the end of civilisation (I know, a little dramatic!), but this doesn’t have to mean the same thing for everyone who listens to the piece. I gradually faded out the looping music and brought the cutoff down on the white noise synth:

However, I did feel as though this section could still have one extra sonic element, so I took some of the really short clips of news articles and put them through the same granular settings I put the Kim Kardashian article through:

I wanted to use these sounds as it feels like the last spectres of humanity are fading with the static at the end of the piece – the voices are like ghosts; faded, chopped up and dismembered but still sort of there. This is what the last minute sounded like, coming from the intensity of the previous section and eventually fading to silence:

It feels good to be at the end of the process of making my prototype soundwork, although I know there is a lot much more work to do on it to transform it into the larger idea I have in my head, including mixing it in 5.1 and making it considerably longer. However, this was as far as I feel I needed to go for now, as I have a narrative framework built in. I think any lengthening will be done to the beginning or middle of the track, as I don’t believe it would be necessary to add anything extra onto the end of what I’ve done, as it will loop round back to the start of the piece easily.

Below is a Soundcloud link to listen to the prototype in its entirety:

https://soundcloud.com/henriparnell/hall-of-fame