Working on the Experimental Audio Project

 


We started working on my audio project with my dad, after long discussions of what it was I wanted to do. My view of the image was different to his; he thouhgt it looked like chaos, whereas I thought it looked like a weird dream in the clouds. We talked about Iannis Xenakis, Metastais and graphic scores, which James had mentioned. The first thing my dad did was tuning his equipment (A 440 hz sine wave). We then decided to add a time frame to the image. Halfway through was 30 seconds and the very end was a minute. This way we could sort of tell when each sound should come in relation to the others.

We started to record it on my laptop with audition, but we couldn´t choose which channels to use (we needed 1-7 but we could only choose 1-2 or 7-8 etc). Because of this we could only record in mono so we decided to use Reaper on my dad´s computer. We created all the sounds using movement with Holonist and an Apple Watch and a Movesense, on my other arm. (You can see from the pictures my dad has quite the studio and so that definetly helped).
As I tried to show in the image above and the image below, we isolated some of the shapes I thought were most prominent and created the sounds for those. The painting was too complicated to create something new for each bit. I´ve circled the shapes in white to show which ones are the ones we worked on.

For the background I wanted it to sound sort of melodic and soft, like I would imagine clouds to sound. We created a soft humming that changes a bit with the colours (I changed the position of my arm). It is quite quiet but you can heat it throughout but especially at the benning and at the end. For the two squares at the very beginning we used frequency modulated square waves to create the sound. The lines at the beginning are fm sine waves that changed in pitch when I lifted or lowered my hand. I had a similair thing for the cirlces as shown in the video below.

For the red cross in the background we used cross frequency modulation. I drew a cross in the air with my hands. This ended up being quite a big unpleasent sound which I thought really suited the shape. The big blue circle I thought looked like a planet, so we made it sound big and ominous. The last thing we did was the squiggly black line. I started from the bottom and went around to the top, mimicing the line with my hand. Our recording peak was -10 db.

 In the edit we lowered some sounds and made some louder. I also edited fade ins and outs to make it smoother. We also cut off the lower, unnecessary frequencies using a HPF (below 25h). In the end we got our loudest peak to -6 db, which is more than enough for material that is not very dynamic.