BA Hons Sound Arts- Y3 Pt1
I think that third year served as a means to develop my practice in a very concentrated way. I was able to further pursue my lines of enquiry and research, which in turn resulted in a further refinement of my creative methodologies.
Building from my investigations into diegesis in second year, my dissertation focused on the link between environmental sounds and composition through the lens of soundscape composition as a score. I feel that the wide variety of sound arts practitioners and scholars have given me a much deeper understanding of ambience and the creative potential it possesses in terms of emotional influence.
Stand out references include:
Michael Gallagher- Gallagher argues there’s to be a compositional nature to field recording and even playback of said recordings, from this it would be possible to argue that recording and assembling ambience for a film is a form of soundscape composition, a musical expression.
Bernie Krause- Krause’s the great animal orchestra reveals the similarities between the natural frequency distribution found within environmental recordings and the organised sonic expression of humankind. This further agues the musical nature of ambience for film.
Martin Stig Andersen- Andersen provided a comprehensive break down of the correlations found between different forms of soundscape composition and abstraction. Coining the term audiovisual correspondence, Andersen replaces an undefined multidisciplinary term (abstraction) with a focused clearly defined term, which can then be used to talk more clearly about the subject. Andersen provides examples of work, some of his own and some conical works of sound art, that display the relationships between emotional expression and audiovisual correspondence.
Cristobal Tapier De Veer- While scoring the 2013 TV series ‘Utopia’, De Veer utilises techniques such as extreme time stretching and bit crushing to create synth pads from organic sound. He describes these processes as disrespecting or torturing sounds. Through these methods, De Veer uncovers the hidden rhythms inherent within the essence of the sound.. These tortured organic sounds are then used as instruments to construct a haunting score resulting in a profoundly unsettling blend between the organic and the synthetic, an extremely effective auditory representation of the narrative. This approach to scoring influenced my considerations of palette, and the contextual links that survive processes of extreme manipulation.