In this blog, I going to go through my intentions and plans for the main sound aspect of my project, which is the musical part.
In the piece, the way I deliver my lines is through rap. I wish I could have sung a song instead but my order of operations has made it so I can come up with anything for the rap, as long as is in time (I’ve filmed it at this point). Another reason I decided on rap is that it’s a lot easier to come up with something like a spoken word piece which is arguably atonal verses singing a predetermined lyric and tune.
The 3 sections of the piece are Soundscape; The Noise; The Melting Pot.
The first section is there to show off some skills I’ve gained in the year via sound design/effects. The way I plan to show that is by using the referencing of different sounds as an excuse to synthesise sounds instead of sampling them. Example – When I say “then the birds, and it’s third” a synthetic bird sound will play, and then it’s third.
The second section is meant to mostly be comical. Musically, it’s the least defined section and it doesn’t necessarily show off my skill but I did think that it would be wrong not to mention noise on a sound art course. Also, I want to sell that uncanny valley feeling and peel back the curtain with it as it strangely breaks the fourth wall (in some respect)
The third part is personally the most important part and integral to the piece itself. “The Melting Pot” is in reference to how I express my creativity in many different ways and the way I’ve dealt with being interested in so many different fields. This project is no different. As an audio-visual piece, no side is complete without the other and abstractly represents me in some way.
The way I’m going to tackle the music is by layering the visual with a click track and then improvising over it. As someone who watches a lot of YouTuber content, you hear a lot of royalty-free music which is the main inspiration for the different style of songs in the piece. I wanted to use the jazz-inspired track as the main part because it gives a homely and is common in vlog videos.
Spectrograms also lie at the heart of the project, which is why I’ve decided to layer everything else with a the “spectrogram track”. While it can’t really be animated like a video, it’ll feature frames from the video meaning that if you viewed the sound in something like Sonic Visualiser, you should see parts of the video in the sound (and not just the video).
My next blog will be focused purely on the details of the biggest problem I’m facing in the project, the spectrogram.