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: