Month: February 2021

Making

My main role in this project has been to organise work loads and try to help guide collaboration, I’m also combining peoples work and mixing it. So far I have found that mixing the pieces has not been too hard, as everyone has created unique pieces and they each serve their own purpose. They seem to work well together, Szymon’s piece creating an eery stirring and creating tension, Daniel’s piece accelerates the tension and chaos into the crescendo, Sephora’s piece creates a calm otherworldly sound-space that somehow stays within the style Szymon’s piece giving the project a full circle feeling. Toby has created sound effects that give the piece texture, subtle sounds that ease us into the madness. Raul and jack wrote the script, Raul also recorded the dialogue and sourced a voice actor.

My contribution to the piece is the crescendo and the hard cut. Appearance and audience being a strong theme I experimented with shaping, moulding and manipulating a crowd of voices. I started by bringing in the sound of a crowd very low in the mix at the point where the protagonist says ‘our society is a spectacle’, I then gradually increased the volume of the crowd. I used a bit crusher on the crowd and gradually decreased the resolution distorting the audio. I also placed a noise gate on the crowd and side-chained it with the dialogue as the input, i started with the threshold very low so the crowd sounded normal, I then gradually increased the threshold leading up to the crescendo. This had the effect of very gradually shaping the crowds voices to the singular protagonist voice, so the crowd noise increases in intensity, and concentrates into the protagonist.

Planning

We have decided to express our idea through an interview, as these are common place in radio and the format gives us room for creativity and manipulation.

Now that we had our idea we could then distribute the work, the work was divided into Dialogue editing, SFX, music and background, and broadcasting. We also had two people write a script and create a timeline of events, this allowed everyone else to begin working on sections.

We will express our piece through an interview of an instagram influencer, as this seems like the epitome of spectacle. The interview will then turn sour at one point, and will begin to turn the soundscape uncomfortable and jarring, the interviewee will begin an impassioned monologue similar to Howard Beale in Network (1976). When we reach a crescendo we will then hard cut to a relaxing auditory space, and an extract from ‘The Society of the Spectacle’ will be read out.

Ive found that he concept for the piece has been pretty much unanimously accepted which I find surprising. However I think its been hard to coordinate collaboration between people as everyone is at home, and the piece is forming as everyone makes their parts. As a result of this the piece has been an amalgamation of peoples works, different tempos and keys. This does have some positives such as giving a sense of chaos (which is a theme we are trying to convey) but I think it would’ve been nice to have people collaborate on sections knowing how they would fit together, perhaps this would be easier to do in person and with more time.

Brainstorming ideas

We started by suggesting themes and feelings we would like our piece to express. The most prevalent themes were uncertainty, society, inauthenticity and social media. Raul suggested using Guy Debord’s book ‘The Society of the Spectacle’, this fit perfectly with out themes so we moved forward with this as our subject. ‘The Society of the Spectacle’ was written in 1967 as a criticism of the encroaching rise of consumerism in Paris. Guy Debord believed that due to capitalist production resulting in an abundance of things, the human need for survival had been met, and subsequently replaced by a need for goods. Humans have developed a ‘need for more’, even when our needs are met. Debord believed this need for more came from appearances, he believed that ‘All having must now derive its immediate prestige and its ultimate purpose from appearances.’ Image and appearances have now become important to individuals above all else, and we are sold products with the promise that it will improve how we are perceived by other people.