I don’t know how much everyone practiced with the set-up in the recital hall, but I spent approximately 3 hours of time rehearsing my piece. 4 hours if you include the hour it took me to figure out the mixer on the first visit!  I suppose I practiced that much because I wanted the diffusion on the day to really bring my composition to life.  Also, because a lot of my sounds were watery/wave sounds, I wanted to know how exactly to pan the sounds around the room to give that feeling of movement as if the sound is washing over you.  I felt practice (as always) would make perfect.

Initially, I was playing through the piece multiple times and improvising movements based on my diffusion strategy diagrams.  I made notes of the movements that worked well with the various sections of the composition.  The notes were vaguely reminiscent of my diffusion strategy diagrams, however took note of the fader positions rather than the audio location in the room as the strategies had done.  After many playthroughs I had built up a set of instructions for most of the parts of the piece, and this became the score I followed on the Friday.  Here is a photo of the score I used on the day:

Diffusion Score

Results:
I definitely felt that having a score made my diffusion more accurate on the day, although I was suprisingly nervous at the time which led to a few errors on my part.  One key error, which occured at 3 minutes 10 seconds, I felt sucked the power out of the last minute of my piece.  It came about by me missing the cue for the particular gesture in the heat of the moment, and was especially annoying because it was the gesture I had spent the most time rehearsing!  Overall though, I felt my diffusion went pretty well, and followed my score almost perfectly.  I was quite pleased with my composition all in all, and having a score was definitely a good thing given the constantly changing dynamics of my piece.  Theoretically, it also means I could repeat the performance on another occasion.

I feel the diffusion of my piece went pretty well.  As I discussed in an earlier post I had tried to mimic the dynamic style of Theme de la Fuite with the composition I made using the sound I recorded of a flushing toilet. I my initial composition worked quite well in this respect, but in the one minute time frame, I didn’t have the time to build tension in certain sections.  In my final four minute piece however, which I have been working on this week, this is something I have remedied.  Long build ups which climax in manic jittery moments.

I have stuck with the ‘watery’ theme of the toilet sounds, but have juxtaposed them with some very electronic glitch sounds (which I made by ‘sonifying’ computer program files using Audacity).  I like the idea that water and electricity can exist side by side in a compostion, and even compliment each other, when in reality, they can not.  The sonic properties of electricity seem to mix rather well with some of the water sounds I have so it should be interesting to see whether the listener can tell the difference.

One last thought… the classic acousmatic effect that seems to pop up in many acousmatic pieces (I’m thinking of Jonty Harrison’s Unsound Objects specifically)… turns out it’s just Flange!

Using the lessons I learnt from diffusing Theme de la Fuite a week or so ago, I have composed the one minute piece in a manner I would deem similar, that is to say with bursts of short sounds followed by longer sounds that bleed in and out of the piece.  Here is what it looks like in the arrange window of Pro-Tools… 

TOILET FLUSH

The piece reminds me in sonically of Jonty Harrison’s Unsound Objects mainly because the toilet flush is comprised mostly of draining water (you may recall that in week 3 we listened to two of Harrison’s pieces, the other was EQ).  The beginning of Unsound Objects is built up mainly of sounds that sound like water draining from an unknown container. 

I’ve tried to structure the piece dynamically into three/four main sections, each of which lends itself to being diffused in a slightly different way.  The piece overall is bounced in mono, so there is no stereo automation, meaning I will have total control over the sounds being heard in each speaker channel.  Hopefully, it will sound ok on the day.

I plan on scoring the diffusion to my final piece before playing it, so I decided to work on a simple notation system that would be useful for such a purpose.  As we are using a four channel set up, I decided to use a square design that could be easily read and understood by a ‘diffuser’ during a concert.  Imagine you are in the middle of the square and the four corners are the four channels.

Here are all the possible variations if you want to diffuse from a SINGLE CHANNEL to any other given channel(s).

ONE CHANNEL DIFFUSION OPTIONS

I thought I’d post this up because some of you may wish to develop your own notation for a score come the end of this module.  I’m working on the more complex multi-channel diffusion combinations also, and I’ll post those up when they’re done.

Laters.x

I particularly like the piece, an expansion of his earlier work Points de fuite (vanishing points), because of its changing dynamics and its overall sci-fi feel.  When I listened to the piece for the first time, I could envisage straight away how I would attempt to diffuse it across four channels.  The earlier section of the composition is filled with ‘manic’ moments where many sounds are thrown together rapidly over a few seconds followed by a long sweeping sound.  I could imagine ‘throwing’ the sounds between the four channels rapidly during the manic moments with a slow pan during the sweeping the sound.  In this way the diffusion would heighten the feeling of chaos by keeping the audience ‘on their toes’ not knowing where the sound is going to appear from next.  The sweeping sound would then ‘calm them down’ by allowing them to predict the movement of the sound through the room.

I feel that diffusing Dhomont’s Theme de la fuite was a fairly intuitive process in the long run.  Listening to the piece a few times I felt as if it was telling me how to diffuse it.  When it came to the ‘performance’ on Friday I thus had a rough diffusion strategy in my head for each of the sections and applied them to the piece ‘on the fly’.  Overall I think I did a pretty good job of achieving the strategies I had worked out, and I hope the audience enjoyed the live mix as much as I enjoyed mixing.

I particularly like the manic moments with calm aftermath at the beginning of the piece, not just for their compositional dynamics but also for their diffusion potential.  I hope ultimately to emulate those dynamics in my final piece.

I believe that for a live mix it would probably be beneficial to the composer to have a more ‘spacious compostion’ (individual sounds that rarely cross each other, as opposed to lots of sounds fading in and out across the stereo field) in order to retain maximum control of the piece.  In a 5.1 automated mix however, the composer has complete control in advance of the performance and so has the opportunity to make the mix much more ‘manic’.

From the examples we have seen in class, I think the shorter sounds tend to lend themselves better to a manual mix with the four channel set-up without sounding sloppy.  I think a much more dynamic piece could be performed using shorter sounds without automated control.

In order to perform a circular pan, however, it seems to me that a longer sound with persistent dynamic properties may have an advantage over such shorter sounds, or longer sounds with their own dynamics (think of my bean bag recording vs. the flushed toilet recording which I demonstrated today).  The toilet sound panned much more smoothly than the bean bag.  

I think a smoother longer sound can move around between the four channels more easily than the shorter sounds which would appear to jump between the speakers.  Not to say that wouldn’t work in a composition however, as a short sound jumping between locations is just as interesting as a long sound doing the same, it just achieves a different effect.

Overall, I think it is important to have a mix of long and short sounds in the final composition, but in order to have maximum control over the positions in the mix, it will be important to structure the piece in movements so that any panning that occurs can be done to maximum effect.

x.

I was reading this article in Edge magazine recenetly on the scoring of the soundtrack to Sony Entertainment’s long awaited “Killzone 2″. The article focused on the 28 minutes of music for the games cutscenes. The score by Joris de Man was initially expected to be fleshed out in MIDI by the games sound designers due to time constraints, however Sony wanted “a triple A title to have a triple A soundtrack.” This led the sound design team to Abbey Road, ultimately realising de Man’s score orchestrally over two days. Nowadays the tendency of games designers to use real recorded audio soundtracks is becoming the norm for big titles. MIDI is still a possibility for the in-game sequences however, mainly due to its ease of use, and thus easier to trigger or build in intensity given in-game events. I realised that I already knew this, and in fact had considered it years ago.

Killzone 2 performed in Abbey Road Studio 1

Game music is all about triggers. I realised this playing the original “Halo” on the Xbox some years ago. When you walked into a room, a beat would start. As you walked deeper into the room certain progressions would add more and more instrumentation, gradually building to a climatic score that would never drop… Until you open the door to the next big set-piece. I remember being deeply impressed with the way the music had not only reflected my style of playing, but also how it had seemed to drive me forward, forcing me to advance in the level so that I could hear the next musical progression. In terms of pacing my gaming experience, it could not have worked more effectively. When I spoke about the Wall-E soundtrack in a previous post, I mentioned that music had to lead the actions of the character because of the lack of dialogue. The music in Halo achieved the same effect; it told the viewer/player what was about to happen.

I thought to myself what other game music had had a similar impact on me pacing wise, and one game that stuck in my mind was “Gears of War”. I decided to look into it, and found the sound designers had also used an orchestra to drive the score. There is an interview with the composer here if anyone is interested in reading it. I also came across this video which talks about the sound design on the sequel, “Gears of War 2″ which I think you should watch because it features an interesting approach to coming up with sound effects for games.

 I’ve had a few ideas so far.  The picture kind’ve dictates to me what the score should be.  We see a beautiful girl, perhaps pregnant, staring into the mirror.  However, whilst the left hand side of the image shows us this girl, the right hand side where the reflection is located reveals a darker side of her personality, almost as if the beautiful image is just for show, and within she is a troubled soul.  Maybe we all see a troubled soul when we look in the mirror, but then maybe I’m thinking too much about it.  Anyway… The score I have decided should reflect this, reading left to right, starting off with a beautiful, almost majestic style, but after reaching the halfway point taking a darker turn.  Thinking back to Murch’s score for THX 1138, and subsequently inspired by it, I am going to reverse the first half of the score, as if the music were also reflecting in the mirror, and then compose over the top of the new reversed soundtrack.  Once reversed the music will have an eerie feel anyway, and so should be relatively easy to evolve into an overll darker piece.

The lines throughout the picture, such as those on the girls closes and the diamond wallpaper should dictate the way the instruments swell in and out of the composition.  I’ve made a simple flash video of the painting with a line that scrolls across the painting like a playhead, so this should enableme to follow the lines more accurately than if I were to simply imagine a scrolling bar.

I’ll post the results/video up as soon as I’ve got a rough demo together of how it all sounds.

Peace.x