Overall I think this project has been successful as an investigation into scoring with diegetic sound, I think due to time restraints and inexperience the outcome isn’t as effective as I would’ve hoped for.
I found the search for a scene probably the hardest part of this project. I imagine if you are involved in the production of the film, you have more control over the audio, you can manipulate the individual sections of audio. I presume you can also create a situation in which this scoring technique would be effective. Using a scene from a film means that the audio is cemented, you can’t separate the dialogue from the room sound etc… I think this results in a significant creative restriction. It reduces the amount of things you can manipulate, and makes you rely on diegetic sound not made for the scene (in my case at least).
I thought that I would be able to think of more techniques to achieve my goal but I sort of reached a wall. After using the vocoder and noise gates I couldn’t think of any more techniques that would work with the context of the scene and my audio resources.
Vocoding-
I found that the vocoder worked well for my intentions, it allowed me to build melodies and scores from the diegetic sound. However, I found it difficult to create a diverse palette from the plugin. All of the synths had a similar sound, and I felt unable to create many layers without muddying the mix. Another problem I had was discussed shortly in the last post, struggling to get definition with complex audio inputs. I felt the ‘plates and chatter’ audio was dense with sounds, especially the high pitch clinking of the plates. I think the vocoder really struggled to pick up these sounds, and the resulting synth sound was more of a rough approximation of the sound, and I think it’s very difficult to hear the connection between the audio and the synth.
Noise gating-
I only really found one use for this which was the breathing. I wanted to diversify the palette with some organic sound, and assign a sound to the protagonist to make the audio more personal, anchoring the score to the protagonist highlighting his emotional turmoil. I think that this worked pretty well, it brought a melodic element to his laboured breathing, and the bit crusher brought a gritty distortion. The only problem I had was the distinction between the inward and outward breaths. I feel the effect would’ve been a lot more effective if I had found a way to make the vocal harmonies resemble and inward breath, I think this would have contained the sound within the character.
Conclusion-
If I were to attempt this project again I would like to be involved in the production of the film, gaining more control of the individual sounds. I would put more research into vocoders and how to retain information from the original audio input. I would also consider creating the sound for a longer scene, and not restricting myself to only instruments created through the diegetic sound. I think the most effective form of this technique would be to ease into the score using the diegetic sound and once a slow build is achieved, start adding elements of a traditional score using normal instruments.