‘Ive been away but now I’m back‘
Mechanical/Natural Harmony
The plan is to attach particular sounds to a point in the environment (eg. A tree or plant). I’ll do this through quadraphonic mixing, then exporting as stereo allowing front to back movement of sound. To keep track of plants placement in the environment I will take a video. I have my method of mixing, I need to now determine the sounds I will use.
I will be trying to reflect the idea mechanical/natural harmony. Im going to build a collection of mechanical and natural sounds separately, then marry the two.
Natural sounds:
Vocals- I think I will use soundgrain to sustain the audio, making for a smoother more permanent auditory environment, by this I mean I hope that it will strengthen the geographical permanence of the sound.
Wind- Hopefully this will be picked up in the sound walk recording, however if it isn’t prominent enough, I’m prepared to record wind separately and mix it in.
Plants rustling- I think this will be picked up in the sound recording, I might interact with the environment to produce these sounds (running hand through leaves). This interaction could be interesting to explore, although I’m not sure what the meaning or purpose would be (maybe to reflect the human/nature relationship). This reminds me of a sound piece by TomuTomu on YouTube called ‘Plant sounds’.
‘The plant’s “state” is represented through sound, primarily frequency. The plant responds to changes in its environment such as humidity, temperature, light, and touch. The micro-voltage fluctuations of the plant are detected by Ag/AgCl electrodes. The voltage is amplified and sent into an Arduino to be digitized. The numeric values are sent to oscillators, resulting in the soundscape.’
Im not going to pretend I understand how this works, I have no idea. However, I will research this at a later date. It would be interesting to recreate this piece and use the audio in my project but I don’t think I have the time to do it. I will however use the audio as a reference for my ‘artificially created’ sounds.
Mechanical Sounds:
Vocoding- I think a sharp, mid to high pitched synth would reflect the mechanical side of this project. To geographically anchor this sound I will vocode parts of the environment, possibly the wind and maybe the rustle of leaves.
Rattling guitar strings- Placing an ebow very close to a guitar string causes the string to rattle against the plastic casing of the bow, harmonically layering this sound results in a harsh yet clean and crisp sound. This sound also has a very metallic quality, probably due to the metal guitar strings.
Rubbing metal together- Personally I love this sound, very high pitched and smooth. It evokes the feeling of movement with minimal friction. The problem with this sound is that the length of it is restricted to the length of the metal, however I plan to solve this by placing the audio in a sampler and using the alternate looping setting, alternating forward and reverse.