“I worked on this piece for the project HARD FOOD today.
I improvised on the JX3p synthesiser and bounced off of her words emotionally. I mixed the vocals nice and wet so it will sound immersive in the vr context.
I recorded this with MIDI and then replaced the sound to string sound and although it’s not the real thing I believe this timbre does better at reflecting upon what she is saying.
Also, the rest of the works in the piece are very synth heavy
creating this piece was a beautiful experience, bouncing off of spoken word poetry is a beautiful experience to partake in, it’s a delicate and fun experience but also daunting as you want to do the words justice !
One big mountain we’ve had to climb as a group is working through the language barrier, this has proven difficult at points because sometimes it is hard to describe what you are thinking creatively even when you all are native speakers of the same language, so doing this when you are not all native speakers makes it all the more challenging. One way we have found a way through this is by the use of references, these have been really helpful to us as if we are sent a reference from another piece of work we have a clear idea of what standards we need to uphold.
In this post I want to quickly reflect on my recent experiences in working as a music producer and doing commission based art collaborative work, in UAL and in the HARD FOOD project.
One thing about music is that in a lot of ways the brief of what you have to achieve is a lot clearer as everyone has a somewhat similar idea` of what a good piece of music is, although it is subjective when working with an artist and listening to their previous work you understand what their standards are and all you have to do is use your talent to work to improve on that and make a musical spectacle.
Wheras with commission the lines are slightly more blurred as often you will receive a specific brief, which means you must carry out a more intrinsic inspection of what you are being asked to do, for example in LOOP it is clear what sounds I need to find and in HARD FOOD I have been given a huge detailed brief.
For the recordings for the sound of the game, I was tasked with making contributions towards the project as using found sounds to create the sounds of what was going on on screen and submitting them as a contribution to the piece.
I started by recording sounds such as typing and different tabletop type sounds to reflect what was going on on screen with a zoom recorder but I found that it didn’t give me enough definition in the top end. Because of this I decided to switch to a condenser microphone, this was more difficult as this mic was definitely more sensitive. however, the definition definitely helped in it sounding more tactile.
Simultaneous to working on my collaborative project with LCC, I have been commissioned to do a VR score for acclaimed artist Amber pinkerton. I am doing the score for her project entitled ‘Hard Food’ which is a poetic visual piece about the emotional hardships that members of the black community face everyday, going into making this project I wanted to focus on it like it was say a film score, or something out of play, using melodic and harmonic motifs, to express the pain and emotions felt during the spoken word pieces.
This led me to listen to Italian film scores to try and fully understand how they covert feeling into sound, and feeling into melody.
Silent Hill’s OST more than any other game I have come has garnered more of a fanbase than anything I have seen on the post playstation OST world.
It’s soundtrack is tasteful, yet eerie, it is futuristic but listening now it has all the hallmarks of a legendary retro game aesthetic.
Atonal pads combined with strange weird loops and interesting rhythmic patterns flutter in and out. What I think is amazing about this OST as although it clearly for a horror video game, it doesn’t have all the usual ‘horror’ tripes that we always hear in movies and games, it creates a horror soundtrack from a new point of view which I find to be really refreshing .
If I was to score a game I think Silent Hill would most likely be my main source of inspiration simply due to the fact that you can hear the pioneering creativity to push the boundaries of what a game is supposed to sound like.
FIFA is one of my favourite games so I read an interview with the woman who oversees the sound!
‘All of our audio work on FIFA is done entirely in-house. The Frostbite engine works similar to Unreal or Unity, where all assets in the game (such as audio, graphics, lighting and textures) are shared within the engine.’
‘We created audio scripts in Frostbite to automate tasks that we would normally do manually, established an audio post-production pipeline that was more efficient and organized, improved the implementation approach for stems and had more time to focus on audio polishing, our creative approach and the overall mix.’
From reading this interview I can see that in big commercial games frostbite seems to be the game engine of choice.
To me video games are one of the most fascinating mediums of interactive art, as they involve skills and techniques that draw from all different mediums whether that be
– Narrative
-Music
-Atmosphere
-Coding/Graphics/Mechanics
-Concept/Otherworldlyness
So doing the sound for a game would mean knowing where you fit as a cog in the machine , as video games are so multi layered. This would include foley type sound which is traditional sound for screen stuff combined with ambient synthy stuff , but it all depends on the subject and what’s on screen!
One Main challenge of doing a collaborative project remotely is the use of group chats. I find it very difficult to communicate in this way, this is because as a studio producer I am used to working with artists in the room, the use of boring group chats can get very Monotonous, just because I mainly find it hard to express ideas creatively through the use of just words, as an expressive person I think it is important to be able to have the option of expressing creative ideas in person. Especially because I believe art is ‘feeling’ and feelings are felt in person through the air.