When starting my piece for this project I wasn’t quite sure what direction I wanted to take it. I’d gone to the seaside to record the change coming out of slot machines, but I hadn’t properly recorded it with an idea of what I wanted to do with it. Originally I thought that I could try and do something rhythmic with all the different recordings but in practice I found it very difficult and decided I needed to change what I was doing. Seeing as the theme of the piece didn’t have to be ‘change’ anymore, I just decided to put a few of the field recordings into my DAW and see what I felt like making.

I started by looping the 18 second sound clip that I included in one of my recent blog posts and used it as a sort of background soundscape to open up with. I put a few plug-ins onto the track to enhance the track a little bit. I added a stereo spread and sample delay to help spread the track across the stereo field, and a short room reverb (I’m not entirely sure why I did this but I felt as though it made the track sound a little better).

I then used a technique that I had used in a previous project – I looped the sound effect of coins dropping that I previously posted on this blog, to make it sound as if it was never ending and the coins never stop dropping. I did this previously in my first project where I made it sound as though a door would not stop creaking open for 2 minutes. I find that if used effectively, this can definitely create a sense of unease in the listener as normally you would not hear that sound continuing for that amount of time – you usually only hear coins dropping from a machine or a door creaking for a couple of seconds at a time.

Already from having these two tracks put together, with all of their overwhelming noises, I figured out that I could make a disturbing piece of sound art that relates to my social anxiety when I am in public spaces. It would be an interesting concept to make something that is purposefully unpleasant to listen to, as I feel like that is one of the only ways to make an audience understand truly how horrible anxiety can be at times. To listen to it and just feel overwhelmed and want it to be over is a very uncommon reaction to want to get from an audience, but I feel as though it could be an interesting experiment.

I tried to add a couple more field recordings from the arcade but it ended up not sounding great and decided it was time to add some new textures.

I found an experimental synth preset on my DAW called ‘Old Robot Factory’ which was very percussive and eerie sounding. I changed some of the settings and added an EQ and some stereo spread and this is the result I got:

At the moment I’m keeping it quite low in the mix, as having it too high does make it feel a bit like a horror/sci-fi track from the mid 20th century. However, if you have it quieter it just adds to a general feeling of unease.

The last thing I’ve added so far to cause a big sense of anxiety is a high pitched, distorted laugh that sort of sounds like a deranged child-demon mocking the listener. Here is the original piece of audio that I recorded, without any plugins:

As you can hear, it doesn’t sound particularly amazing. In order to fix this I added a vocal transformer, chorus, EQ, reverb, heavy compression and distortion. Here is the end result:

I’m not sure how I feel about this sound at the moment but I’m going to stick with it for now and see where the piece takes me. I think it definitely adds to the piece feeling very overwhelming, so in that sense it does work but I’m not sure if it maybe comes across too gimmicky.

This is as far as I am with the piece so far, and I will update the blog as I go along. I think I’m happy with the direction I’m taking, although if I had more time I would probably start off a few pieces and see which one I think is best.