While I have provided a strong basis for exploring the topics I am discussing, I feel wholly unsatisfied with executing this audio paper. I struggled to balance its composition and structure’s creative and academic components. I may have leaned too heavily into the research narration to support my themes. It was also challenging to balance this assessment with the Spatialization Unit and my work outside of school, and I do feel some of my work suffered in all areas due to this. My biggest takeaway from this project is to pace my assessments in the future so that instead of dedicating specific weeks or months focusing on one thing (which is my natural creative tendency), it is better to make sure I am doing small work consistently as to have proper time to consider all the possible issues I may face while working towards a hand-in. However, I feel that my references were strong, my use of the format was interesting and unique, and I could discuss ideas with passion and creativity. Overall, while an interesting exercise, I think I would like to avoid doing an audio paper next year unless the topic absolutely lends itself to the format, as I found certain moments in the paper a bit redundant when thinking about their presentation when compared to a written paper.
Final Reflections After Crit Feedback
I was surprised at the positive reactions to the piece during critical feedback this week. While I am by no means ashamed of my work, I always feel a sense of anxiety bringing so much of my work, which is oriented in sound design to express narrative in a course that I have found deals so much with recorded and analog sound to create conceptual depth and express artistic philosophy. However, the reactions and commentary from my peers opened up conversations that have made me meditate on my practice a lot, especially as it inspired this piece from the beginning. The comment that struck me the most was that the piece had an element of humor and play and that the complicated sound design all spoke to a sense of joy in its aesthetically dark and synthetic world. This was impactful because the piece’s original intention was to reexamine my practice from the outside, especially after experiencing something dangerously close to burnout and feeling a loss of connection with myself after focusing so much on external response and momentum with my art. The fact that this sense of play was felt by my peers also gave me reassurance that the love I have and put into my work still lives strong and will carry me into the future of my practice, even when the pressure feels like too much, and I lose sight of myself in the chaos of creating and performing. I also felt a sense of progress with the technical aspects of my work, as many of the things I thought I did by accident within the piece were technically impressive and complicated in the eyes of my peers. I understood that I have become comfortable enough with my tools in the past two years that I can now use discovery, error, and accidents as a critical component of creating work, and that is exciting as I no longer am entirely relying on inspiration from other artists to find direction with my sound design. The process and inspiration are very personal, and I feel much more excited about this piece and its place in my work now, both in and outside of school.
Research Pt. 3
The Aesthetic of Failure: “Post-Digital” Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music by Kim Cascade is a rich resource for explaining the sonic aesthetic of contemporary club music. It talks about how working in environments dominated by technology has begun to influence the sound design techniques of music created in DAW, much like industrial music was influenced by the sound of industrial environments. As this relates heavily to my personal practice, I found its discussion on peripheral blindspots to be fascinating to explore. These blindspots don’t have to be exclusively physical; they can lie at the edges of the software and our imagination in how we use the available tools. I have always stood by the philosophy of “breaking” Ableton to get the most rich, moving, and texturally interesting sounds, and Cascone’s work vocalizes this philosophy candidly. It could also provide some form of legitimacy to a genre or community that sometimes feels too abstract to define or pin down. Discussing deconstructed club more, with its sonic trends of glitching, error, and failure, could be more effective in communicating the culture, as even the term “deconstructed club” often feels derogatory to a genre whose philosophy is so much more expansive.
Composition II (Immersion and Submersion in Spatial Audio)
In contrast to the chaotic and disorderly spatial elements and sound design within the piece, the other atmosphere that I wish to express within certain sections of the composition is the complete dissociative and exhausted states that I reach while performing. Often, when performing and in my recorded movement, I reach a level of exhaustion that brings me to the floor, and among the smoke and strobe lights, the boundary between my skin, the music, and the outside world feels very thin. It is almost like being underwater, where the space feels so saturated that it brings an element of oneness to the world around me. I am attempting to recreate these moments in the video with two techniques:
Filter Modulation and Circular Panning
While the technique is quite simple and not exclusive to multi-channel composition, the added depth provided by spatial audio adds an additional layer of immersion. Modulating a high-pass filter on all 8 channels, in addition to slow circular surround panning of certain elements, creates a feeling of being submerged. This “underwater” atmosphere is enhanced by automating the speed of the circular panning, which mirrors the resistance your body feels when moving through water. The octophonic setup brings an extra dimension of believability to this sonic phenomenon.
Composition
A lot of the composition process feels like it has been done beforehand, whether through directional instructions from the transcribed movement or noticeable shifts in physical and emotional states, both felt and expressed in the video, creating predefined “movements” within the piece in attempting to convey the elements of failure, exhaustion, and disorder of the movement in the sound design process I have discovered several new tricks and surprises playing with Ableton’s surround panner and audio effects.
LFO and Panning
Ableton’s surround panner device is exact because it can control the width and diffusion of the sound being panned. While this has obvious intended uses, I found that adding LFOs to both the diffusion and width control in combination with the already fast and dynamic panning of the piece creates weird tails and interruptions in the panned samples. While I discovered this entirely by accident, it brings a chaotic tinge to the panning that aligns with some of the more disordered movements I was making during the middle section of the dance. It is also sonically very dynamic and disorienting. It is difficult to understand the full effect without an octophonic setup, but you can still grasp the effect of this technique in the audio below:
Saturation and Grain Delay
While creating this track, my left monitor began to blow out and fail; the sound would fizzle and switch rapidly between stereo sound and just the right channel being played. While distressing, this also inspired me the general aesthetics of error in the sound design. Recreating this sensation in the track felt conceptually satisfying as it embodied the sound of an actual technical failure of the gear I used while writing. I created this sensation by using Ableton 12’s ability to control the saturation of both low and high frequencies in its saturation audio effect. When using an LFO set to the “stray” waveform at rapid speeds, it disrupts and clips the signal in a way that sounds similar to a blown-out speaker. Combined with a tight spray pattern and high feedback in grain delay, the rapid shifts between blown-out saturation and hard metallic qualities gave the entire sound of this section a very visceral feeling and I felt it accurately expressed the violent movement performed when dancing to such synthetic and intensely distorted sounds.
Body to Noise
While I am employing a lot of synthesis-based sound design in this piece, I want it to remain very physical so that whatever moves through the octophonic space still feels like a presence. To do this, I have designed each layer of the track to reference a zone of the body so that when moving in unison, they constitute a single presence, and any disruptions created by panning will accurately reflect their disorder during certain moments of the movement. I have gone with a simple approach of bass representing the lower body, percussion representing the chest and arms, and the pad representing the head. Each element of the track also reflects the dynamics of each body part. For example, headrush, dizziness, and disassociation can be expressed through a pad widening or closing and panning around the room. Disruptive kick patterns and separate panning of the kick and noise percussion can also represent each arm separately and the tension between them and the torso. Accompanying these sounds with the field recordings of breath and tactile sounds expresses the synthetic body formed through interpreting music that is then translated externally during my performance.
- LOWER BODY/BASS
- TORSO AND ARMS/PERCUSSION
- HEAD/VOCAL PAD
Research Pt.2 (Sonic Examples Continued)
The other music I have been listening to and will most likely discuss in my audio paper is my friend Kasimyn’s record BUNYI BUNYI TUMBAL, released recently. When ideating on the audio paper, I immediately thought of him, as our discussions always centered around music’s relationship to society, geography, and political history. In this record, he uses club music structures to reflect on the Dutch colonization of Indonesia, specifically on a collection of photographs during the era, which depicts nameless victims caught in the crossfire. Sonically, the stretched drums and distorted samples are meant to reflect the spirits of people forever caught within this space. As a project, its strong conceptual foundation within a specific act of violence can demonstrate the deeper, more meditative nature of this type of sound and its ability to mourn and bring catharsis around such atrocities. While it does not focus as much on a club environment specifically, the fact that the structure of club music can transcend partying and provide a rich examination of history and oppression can become a strong argument for the genre as a reflection of anxiety in modern society.
Field Recording
Much of the field recording I am doing for this piece is simple and mainly done with contact microphones and the audio technica microphone I have at home. As I feel the relationship between body and breath constitutes the general rhythm of dance and movement, I wanted the two sounds that I use to establish my personal physical presence in the piece to be heavy breathing and the sounds of the gear (military tactical vest) that I wear when I perform. I also like the idea of an organic source (breath) and the sounds from an inanimate object representing my body. Conceptually, the contrast mirrors the space I am exploring in this piece regarding the intersection between my body and digital sound. I intend to process these heavily so that they feel buried underneath the track, just as I find it challenging to find the limits of my body in the physical space amongst the numerous stimuli firing while I perform.
Sample Recording of Tactical Vest Movement:
Meditations on Dance, Noise, and Sound Design
I am drawing on my background as a dancer much more to create this piece than in any of my other work. Music has always been a physical presence to me and processed through physical sensations arising from different parts of my body. Through my years of dance, I have understood that one of the fundamental attributes of a dancer’s style is error. Absorbing music, channeling intention mentally, and executing, which always involves some form of imperfection and error, make up a movement. These three abstracts, “motions” or steps in the process, are spaces I wish to explore in this piece.
Absorbing Music
In my practice now, the process of using music in the context of dance has much to do with the space of intersection between the body and noise. When music with a certain level of intensity is played at such a high volume, it triggers innate physiological reactions in the body. Adrenaline spikes, breathing rhythms change, and the movements that feel most natural to access begin to transform. It creates a second body underneath the skin, and when it comes to noise and deconstructs music, it feels like a synthetic or digital body is manifested within. I would like to use my sound design skills to extract this body and manifest it as a presence in the room. The compositional structure can reflect how it moves and transforms according to shifts in physical states.
Channeling Intention and Execution
The bridge between intention and execution in dance is error. Sometimes, a movement does not come out of the body as intended but opens up new pathways and dimensions of your expression that were never intended. Much of my movement style relating to my performance is harnessing this error and giving it the power to guide me as I move and interact with a space and the people inside it. I feel that this sensation can be reflected within sound design as well. So much of my sound design deals with pushing Ableton to its limits and giving it space to create unexpected and unpredictable results. When you combine audio effects and tools outside their original intention, the program “breaks,” except that nothing ever really breaks in Ableton. There is a natural alignment between my philosophy with movement and sound design. By giving more space in the writing process on the DAW for error and failure, I feel that the narrative of my movement and how it has developed can be expressed in a visceral manner.
Research Pt. 2 (Sonic Examples)
I wish to use two experimental electronic songs/records released in the past couple of years as my main sonic references. I feel that it is important that my examples are contemporary electronic music, highlighting the most immediate aesthetic trends in the genre to support my argument. The first is the Attachment Style by KAVARI, as its use of distortion and resonance within dance music speaks to a more violent, cathartic, and aggressive form of EDM. As an artist that deals a lot with themes of physical pain and discomfort, sexual violence, identity issues, and psychological dissociation, her music represents a lot of the challenges and trauma in the modern youth. The fact that her philosophy around sound design is so in tune with physical sensation and the emotions connected to such sensations speak to the intuitive and intensely emotional nature of club music today. The fact that the bones of old dance music genres such as drum and bass are still recognizable in this track also grounds it in tradition and can contextualize the discussion of deconstructed club in older dance music genres so that anyone unfamiliar with the genre has a basis of which to judge and examine it.