Martin Stig Anderson Lecture
Martin Stig Anderson begins his lecture by reading a couple of reviews people had written about his work on the 2010 game ‘Limbo’. As you can see the reviews are completely polarised as to whether there is music in the game. Music can be much more than rhythm, harmony and melody. Ambient and environmental noises are the feature of the show.
Anderson lays the foundation of his practice with the definition of music as ‘organised sound’, then going on to talk about Pierre Schaeffer’s music concrete. There must, however, be a distinction between soundscape composition and music concrete, although they are essentially the same practice there is an important varying factor. In the practice of soundscape composition, ‘the original sounds must stay recognisable and the listeners contextual and symbolic associations should be invoked’. – Barry Truax
Soundscape composition exists on a spectrum with music concrete, between contextual immersion, abstracted middle ground and absolute abstraction. Music concrete is the movement from a abstracted middle ground to absolute abstraction, and soundscape composition a movement from contextual immersion to abstracted middle ground.
A technique Anderson uses to merge orchestral elements into the diegesis of the film is spectral interpolation, for the game limbo he did this with an orchestral recording and a recording of a foundry. ‘It retains the nuances of the orchestral but its not really there at the same time’. This was for one of many rotating rooms in the game. The second was a room of circular saws, for this he used a recording of a bowed cymbal, yet again he interpolated the orchestral sound with this recording. This results in a diegetic sound with complete contextual immersion, which contains harmonic/melodic qualities. Anderson uses source filtering and convolution techniques to merge the two audio