Tag: Spatialization

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.

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.

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.

1. LOWER BODY/BASS
2. TORSO AND ARMS/PERCUSSION
3. HEAD/VOCAL PAD

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:

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.

I have attached below two diagrams translating the two most commonly occurring and discernible directional patterns in my movement from the video I recorded. I intend to use these two patterns and their gradual decay into chaos and disorder as the basis for my composition. The first pattern involves simple unified movements into each cardinal direction in the octopohnic ring. The second involves many repeated movements that sometimes rebound between the sides of the octophonic ring and circle it. It is interesting to reflect on the fact that the opportunities provided by spatial audio change the idea of a “drum pattern” to a “direction pattern” where, as opposed to the linear layering of elements, the composition of the piece is also informed by the placement of a sound in a space that goes beyond the linear nature of “lanes” in Ableton working on an x and y-axis. I intend to use these repeating patterns as a foundation for the composition and have much of the changes, like the movement, reflected in disruptive panning and sound design that informs failure to express the exhaustion and disorganization of the body over time.

For the initial stage of my piece, I recorded myself moving to the last track I used for my performance in Vienna. I created a circle with eight markers to represent the speakers in the octophonic ring. Additionally, I set up a strobe light to immerse myself further in the space and get closer to the mindset and atmosphere in which I usually perform. I tend to be quite disassociated while performing and moving to music; it feels very subconscious. However, I have recognized consistent patterns that I am sure will inform the composition of my piece. Generally, due to exhaustion, I lose control of my limbs, and movement becomes more disorderly as I keep dancing. My body begins to lose a sense of unified movement as the adrenaline spikes, and I become more tired. I also tend to move to the floor and lie down, grind, and use slow, more comprehensive movements with my upper body when I hit peak levels of exhaustion and, notably, when my music has moments with really wide pads and drawn-out bass notes. These are all elements that I am sure will inform the writing process, and abstracting these physical and emotional states is an element to consider with the sound design I use in this piece. I will continue to examine this video and transcribe and generalize the patterns of movement displayed to write the piece as choreography and directionally in the context of spatial audio. The thing I desperately wish to avoid is for it to feel static and for the spacial context to feel forced; it is essential I create a presence within the octophonic ring that moves dynamically, similar to my own movement.

My one-on-one session with Gareth gave me two interesting angles on this project. In explaining my idea, I was shown two pieces of work. One was a video of a woman dancing with contact microphones that produced some very tactile body movement sounds. Potential avenues for exploring this idea in my work could include using contact microphones to record the sounds of skin, breath, and clothing and playing with the placement and movement of these elements within the octophonic space to create the sensation of a presence dancing within it. The second piece of work was a sculpture of a shed exploding. I felt that this interplay between stasis and entropy and destruction and cohesion were very interesting ideas to bring to an audio piece about dance and movement, especially when it is multichannel. If there are ways to potentially express both the inner and outer sensations of my dance style and movement and almost split the atoms of the physical sonic presence dancing in the octophonic space, it could reflect internal emotional and abstract physical states that occur with dance. My general takeaway is that my piece will focus largely on physical presence, the body, and deconstruction. I want to be able to align the development of my practice with the technical skills I have acquired through its evolution to explore these ideas.

While I have taken many of my pre-established skills and techniques into my work at school, I have tried to make much of it something that feels distinctly separate from my primary practice to expand creatively and get the most out of each assessment. However, the pressure brought on by my primary practice has begun to take a toll on me, and it is becoming more challenging to balance my schoolwork and satisfyingly work as an artist. I would like to use this spatialization assessment to bridge the gap between the two and create a model for expanding my art within the context of school in a manner that serves both environments. My initial idea is to somehow reflect my presence as a performer within the space of the octophonic ring without using my actual body. When hearing a lot of the multi-channel work, I felt that it included a lot of immersive sound with fluid spatial panning that was very subtle and delicate in nature. With my already somewhat brutal and chaotic sound design techniques and aggressive performance style, I would like to explore using spatial audio in a similarly violent and dynamic way. While I don’t have a full concept, imagining the sonic phenomena produced by using the system this way is very exciting, and if it can open up a possibility to merge my practice with this assessment, I feel I will be able to create something meaningful and compelling.