We met up at Dan’s house to do the mixing and spatialisation – it went very well, minimal work was needed to tie things together. Levelling, a bit of reverb of some channels but no more than that. This was actually very surprising and forunate – we had allocated a lot of time for mixing as we thought we would have a bit of a jigsaw puzzle on our hands but it turned out great!

Afterwards, we incorporated some spatial aspects within the wind and atmos, creating a more immersive surround sound soundscape using binaurally panning software. This immersion wasn’t so noticeable unless listened to back-to-back with the prior mix, but I have found that lots of small changes like that add up to create a subtly nuanced mix.

Dialogue recording was done at my house, I set up this old Philips mic which has a very un-sensitive diaphragm and also a narrow, filtered frequency response. This all results in a very dry, radio/telephone style sound which required only a touch of compression to make it sound right. No additional filtering or tone alteration occured, just the straight mic signal. A touch of compression and that was the sound that ended up in the game.

The voice actress was a good friend of mine named Emily, and though she doesn’t really sound old enough to be a mother I don’t think think that it’s unreasonable to suspend reality for that one detail. Being a student, many of the people I encounter that could be voice actors for me are also of student age. This is a limitation that didn’t occur to me at first, but in future I’ll know to try and get a more age-appropriate actor for the dialogue. Voice tone character is more important that I realised initially.

How accurately does this assignment simulate the range of collaborating experiences that sound practitioners participate in within a professional context?

This unit has felt very disconnected; the (cross discipliniary) collaboration and communication was minimal and if this was occuring within the confines of a professional job I would feel unsure as to the exact conditions for a successful set of deliverables. Someone playing the role of a producer or creative organiser would have been very helpful when it came to marrying the two fields of study, although spending the project partly in the dark seems to be a realistic preparation for the world of ‘real work’. Low budget projects often seem to be disorganised.

Internally, amongst my sound arts group, the communication and ease of collaboration was through the roof – all went well there, but I think that often happens on teams of sound practitioners. We mostly get along well, at least this has been my experience encountering sound workers in the world of professional work.

Integrating our audio into the game world using FMOD was always an intimidating notion to us, but we felt confident that we could surmount the challenge when it came up (especially with Iñaki on board; a computer -grounded man). So, when the potential to instead dub the audio to a video demo as one would treat a movie, we unanimously agreed that it would be prudent to take the path of least resistance so as to ensure a more equal role-distribution system and a more guaranteed easily achievable assignment. Especially at a time when all of us have so much other work to be getting on with – working on audio for others’ final projects and other external things.

Besides, we never managed to get an FMOD file from or equivalent MA course-mates.

Whilst conversing about the best methods with which to accompany the plot of the game through audio, Iñaki Dan and I landed on the idea to manipulate the player’s sense of space. Due to the minimal in-game movement and subtle foley cues we had to work with, finding an avenue to focus on seemed the best option. Creating a contrast of space between inside and outside the phonebooth; creating an environment of quieter contemplation within the booth and emphasising the harsh storm on the outside.

Although we talked together as a group a lot about atmos and the sense of space, it was Dan who ended up with the task of actually sculpting the atmos. He did a great job, spatialising the wind with binaural pan pots. He also went and did some evening field recordings inside a phone booth to get the room tone (is a phonebooth a room?) which turned out great and provided a very immersive sound stage.

Overall the immersive and all-encompassing nature of the game turned out to be very successful in my opinion, and it was a good example of having the germ of an idea and then fleshing it out through discussions before actually acting on those decisions in the DAW.

We have decided to delagate according to the following specifications:

Iñaki: ‘Music’, comprising mostly abstract audioscapes.

Dan: Foley.

Hywel: Dialogue recording, atmos and tension building drones.

We’ve elected to each go away and create our own sounds, and then reconvene at a later date to combine and spatialise our recordings.

I’ll be using an old microphone pulled out of a desktop cassette dictation device build by Sony. This will give a filtered, phone-like quality to the dialogue recordings and will ensure that less work will have to be done in post to artificially create a filtered sound.

Tension building drones will be synthesisers and manipulated field recordings.

Atmos will most likely be pulled from my existing audio archive of recordings.

The group we have been assigned to has very little cares when it comes to the realm of audio. We seem to have complete creative freedom and we plan to abuse this fact to ensure that our work is massively uncommercial and centered around the enjoyment we have for implimenting absurd and overblown audio characteristics.

Soundscapes and drones will occur.

Crisp, crunchy foley will occur.

Dialogue that is recorded with a microphone ripped out of an old desktop cassette dictaphone will occur.

We have free reign, we can do whatever our sound arts hearts desire, and holding back is simply not an option.

I’m assigned to a group with Inaki and Dan, and we’re working on a VR game project surrounding the issue of mental health. The game takes place mostly within a phone booth, although the player will spawn outside of the booth and has to walk inside to begin play.

The group assigned to us already has a team-member dedicated to score, so our work lies almost entirely in the foley/diegetic world; ambiences, player generated sounds, environmentally generated sounds.

They’ve provided an existing video game as a reference, which is titled ‘What Happened to Edith Finch’ and envoles a lot of character movement. The movement of the character is spurred on by the sound design, following a variety of sounding objects like birds and twinkles. Other than that, the game features many sounds close to the character; wind rustling as the character flies through the air, lots of clothing noise, breathing, etc. There are also some ethereal drone textures that seem omnipresent and exist outside of the diegetic world. This is in place of score.

This game bears very little similarity to the game provided to us. It focuses heavily on movement the sounds that are created by that; our game has almost no movement and instead focuses primarily on dialogue. There will need to be some creative thinking.

For my final sound piece, I recorded lots of my small circuits together, processed them with only a digital delay, printed them straight to tape and then dubbed some wholly absurd bepop jazz guitar and bass over the top.

The electronics were purely of my own construction, and they consisted of a couple of oscillators and a tremolo. I printed some of the oscillators running as LFOs, then clocked my tremolo with other LFOs, sending audio rate oscillators through the input of the trem. Then, on another pass, through the send of my mixer I was retriggering my tremolo using the combined output of many LFOs which was processing more oscillators. These ended up (through a bit of ping-ponging) onto three channels of tape, with the guitar and bass sum ending up on the fourth. Plenty of analogue drive was used, even some select-band feedback was used to alter the guitar and bass as they were summed, by re-sending the summed signal into the bus that was being summed from (with some drastic EQ in between).

Conceptually, it borrows from ideas from Makoto Oshiro, other artists I like like Madalyn Merkey, and combines it with the bombastic tendencies of the most silly bebop jazz to create a composition that represents how I feel about this assignment.

Lack of organisation on my part, too much changing my mind, fluctuating degrees of interest in academic writing, coupled with a spontaneous trip to Paris in the middle of trying to write the essay all joined together to make a hectic and stressful experience. The past two weeks have sounded not dissimilar to my piece “Mommy, I think I broke the radio ._.” because I’ve been tinkering with horrendously unstable and sometimes ear-splittingly loud circuitry, and then taking breaks from that and essay writing to blast out some highspeed jazz lines on my guitar as a form of comfort and stress relief. It helps me think.

Overall – I’m incredibly happy with how the piece turned out. And I think I’ll make some more in the same style very soon.

I’m feeling disenfranchised with academic writing. Perhaps this is an organisational thing, but it feels as though there is very little point to what I’m doing. The research and discovery that it has prompted me to do have expanded my knowledge of subjects that I’m interested in and have refined my field of study, but going through the motions of writing a few pages on the sources that I’ve used (when mostly I’ve just been finding sources that support my opinions or confirm existing knowledge) seems contrived and slightly pointless.

Most of my sources are online articles on specific things, interviews in video or written form, or the websites of synth builders. How do I talk meaningfully about these sources?

“This article taught me XYZ on this subject, and it enabled me to write about it in my essay because I now have a source for it.”

“These websites set up by synth designers display all of their products alongside descriptions of how they work, often a manifesto, and are designed to make you want to purchase something from them.”

“These interviews lent me insight into the design process of certain bits of equipment, and taught me about how this person thinks about circuit design. I will now detail how this person talks about synth design.”

The three above sentences sum up my source use very well, in a concise manner, and I feel that going more in depth than an extra 100-200 words on each seems to be a celebration of fillibustering. I’m going through the motions of academic writing without being in any way attatched to the process, especially that of finishing the essay. I’m unsure about how many sources I need to use, how much I can say without using sources, and on top of all of this, it feels as though my essay is almost entirely pointless in the grand scheme of things. I’m referencing things so that my facts can easily be verified, but I’m not saying anything new. Nothing in my essay is new, it is all simply regurgitation of things that I have found, and this is disheartening. Many of the concepts that I’m exploring seem to have already been explored to their logical conclusion before I was born, and maybe that’s why I’m so interested in them in the first place. But I can’t shake the feeling that the literature review is almost the same as the essay – the essay uses the data gained from the literature to package and present facts in a digestible and concise manner, and the literature review talks about the data that I got from the sources. These feel like two sides of the same coin – I will be presenting the same information using a different word order. Perhaps I’ve misunderstood the point of the literature review – I haven’t attended too many lectures recently and was too busy working on external audio projects to attend my 1-on-1 tutorials.

My problems are certainly organisational issues. Massive deja vu here, this happens every assignment. But it feels like essay writing gets in the way of my practical explorations, and that frustrates me. Today, I’ve spent my morning at my workbench working on a tremolo unit that needs to be finished before I can start playing around with my polyrhythmic drum machine design, but I keep having to slap myself on the wrist and get back to writing this literature review and finishing the referencing for my essay. I enjoy the practical work. It makes me very happy, I feel that I am working hard and getting results out of it. I feel as though it will benifit my life, progress my artistic potential and massively boost my skillset, as well as setting me up for the future. My essay writing seems to be more akin to ticking a box and jumping through hoops. I definitely think that this is a childish, immature, hedonistic way to think about things, but its a feeling that I cannot shake. These feelings are what the blog is for, I suppose? Perhaps this is too conversational for university and I will be marked down for it.

This bears a striking resembelance to me not attending university lectures over the past ~2 weeks because I’ve had so much work to do regarding this essay. Can’t attend uni because of uni; very very amusing predicament. Can’t do any circuit design because I must write about doing circuit design. All of these issues stem from my lack of organisation, but despite my best efforts I always seem to fall into the same problems. It’s making me think that university life isn’t for me; my brain is not wired to be an academic because the past two years has proved that I’m incapable of doing anything unless it’s up against deadline. Or maybe, university life is perfect for me because I will learn better and better ways of managing my time so that this doesn’t happen next year with my dissertation. Glass half empty, glass half full. I’d like to think I’m not stuck in my ways, as stagnation and inflexibility is a heinous crime that signifies the death of the mind. But look at this wall of text above, I’ve written just under a thousand words in 10 or 15 minutes, with plenty of potential future essay topics contained within – the psychology of procrastinaors, practise vs research, what is the purpose of academic writing, pessimists within the education system, hedonism and the short-term biological reward system within a modern long-term goal orientated society.

Maybe uni is indeed for me.