Author: Jacob Lyttle

Production, creative journeys and timelines – Kate Carr (22nd January 2024)

Dawn Chorus

How is the context of show shaping, frustrating or inspiring the work you are planning?

The context of my work being used in a show has forced me to think more about the audience and their interaction with the piece.

What changes (if any) have these prompted in your plans?

Have any of these limitations proven useful for generating the work?

Are there any limitations you are struggling with right now?

What development may look or sound like? Working with new methods, New types of sounds or FX, Moving into new mediums, New collaborations but it also might be drilling more deeply into your existing sounds and methods, Stripping thing back, a new layer or dimension to an existing idea.

Visual Music

“Visual music can be defined as time-based visual imagery that. establishes a temporal architecture in a way similar to absolute music.”

It฀is฀commonly฀assumed฀that฀each฀sense฀has฀its฀proper฀sphere฀(e.g.฀sight฀is฀concerned฀with฀color,฀ hearing฀ with฀ sound฀ and฀ taste฀ with฀ flavour). in฀ noisy฀ surroundings,฀ speakers฀ can฀ be฀ understood฀ more฀ easily฀ if฀ they฀can฀be฀seen฀as฀well฀as฀heard

https://www.ninelyraeproductions.com

Nine Lyrae is a synaesthesia exhibition at the Oxo Tower. It showcases over 20 different artists in partnership with Brunel University London. I looked into the work of Ninghui Xiong who is a visual artist and researcher based in Beijing, China. His case study on Music Visualization & Emotion Expression on BACH’s Face made me think about how I should be using colour in my piece and made me think about the different colours that represent different emotions and feelings for people that are hard of hearing. For my piece it would be a good idea to use red’s and blue’s when the sound is intense and threatens and using yellows and greens when the sound is calming.

Portfolio Wider Research – WeirdCore

Weirdcore is an anonymous audio visual artist who has worked with Aphex Twin, Arca, Tame Impala, M.I.A, CHARLI XCX and many more current artists. Their art is really unique and inspiring to me on this project, in particular the music video they made for APHEX TWIN for his song T69 Collapse, the video merges animation and real life scanning of buildings (maybe through google maps) to create something hallucinatory and beautiful. The live face mapping that they did at Aphex’s 2017 Field Day set was something that I could try to implement into my final piece as it would be interesting to merge that with puredata gem’s functions.

Weirdcore does live “sound-reactive visuals, some react to the bass, some the mids, others the highs, and so on,” this is what I have been experimenting with in puredata so it’s cool to see how complex and intricate I could make the Audio Visual piece.

The other thing I find inspiring about weirdcore is the implimentation of popular cultural icons and celebrities that make the work more relatable and nostalgic. In my piece it would be good to include imagery that the audience can relate to and find nostalgic.

puredata Further Experimentation

Today I learnt how to load pictures and videos into puredata with the pix command. This experimentation has completely changed the way I can use Gem as I can now overlap shapes and pictures and modulate them with puredata commands.

For my final piece I want to mix real photos I have taken with gems shapes and use randomised sequencers with samples to create an AV generative video.

Experimentation for Portfolio – Puredata

I have been experimenting with the Puredata plugin Gem to create visuals that react with audio. At first I found it really hard to get the hang of and was on the verge of giving up all together, I couldn’t seem to get any sound and the Gem plugin wasn’t showing visuals, after a night of downloading different versions of both puredate and Gem I finally got it to work. To begin with I just started with simple objects such as spheres cubes.

After experimenting for a while and from the help of YouTube I managed to start experimenting with flashing lines and adding objects onto of this.

Now I had found objects and a colour scheme that I thought looked good together I began to experiment with adding sound. I created an 8 step sequencer that played a kick drum every 1st and 3rd step with a different percentage of playing for the other 6 steps. When. the kick drum was played it changed the size of. the outer cube. I also added hi-hats on every step that rotated. the inner cube on its X axis.

Performing Sound – Jose Macabra

For my fictional live performance I will be playing at Peckham Audio as it is available for private hire with 80 people seated and the rest standing. For the live show rider I will require a projector and I will also use strobe lighting.

Venue – Peckham Audio

Artist Name – The Sentinel

The Sentinel is an audio visual artist who uses coding to create a mix of photography, videography and coded shapes. They create generative audio which the visuals react to, producing an immersive and unique experience.  Join us for a night of immersive generative audio visual work from the artist The Sentinel.

This event will contain flashing images.

Exhibition Name – 010101

What’s the aim of a sound art performance?

Create a memorable experience?

Taking risks, creating experiences, vulnerability, 

Create awareness about a social or political situation?

Virtuosity exposure?

Improvisation, feedback,

What makes a good performance?

Suddeninfant 

Ryoji Ikeda – use of visuals

What makes a good sound art performance?

Flow state, confidence, 

How should we choose our artist identity and show concept?

Why do we want to perform? Performance is a form of escapism

Why do we love sound art?

What do we want to give our audience? An experience and emotions

Ryoji Ikeda 8th of November

Today I went to see Ryoji Ikeda at the Barbican. The night started off with the artist Rachika Nayar who performed a beautiful ambient set without visuals, the set consisted of beautiful evolving pads and progressive chords that filled the room. For most of the set I kept my eyes closed and the music took me to another place. Whereas for Ryoji Ikeda’s set I had my eyes wide open staring at the screen and couldn’t take my eyes away even if I tried. Ryoji Ikea played his album Ultratronics in full, it blew me away. I had never been to an audio visual performance before but now my interest in the form of art had peaked. The visuals completely captured the essence of the music and made me interested in how I could replicate this myself. I did some research and found that he uses puredata, I had used this last year but only for audio. My favourite part of the experience was the ending when he added colourful imagery of the sun, planets and molecules combined with glitchy code and ambient audio to create a breathtaking scene.

Participatory Sonic Practise

During this lecture I learnt the important role of audience interaction when creating an art piece, it is important to have the audience interaction so that your project can be funded.

Paulo Freire

Students have no knowledge and are filled with knowledge  by their “expert” teachers. Bell Hooks, Teachers and students should  learn together and be critical about the situation they’re in. Critical dialogue, questioning the situation you’re in. Theatre of the oppressed. Image theater. Invisible theater (taking theater outside of the theater, outside), Forum theater (short play eg 10 minutes about oppression, things are driven to worst possible conclusion, using audience to interact and fix the situation), cardboard citizens, 

Claire Barclay –  The Millenium Hut 1999

Amy Culter

Why does it always rain on me? – Travis.

Amy used cut-up technique with a range of pop songs that included phrases about rain and stitched them together with time stretching to create a really interesting body of work.

Pathetic Fallacy, Medley ( the two meanings of Medley is what Amy found interesting), Lullaby, Litany, Aria, Symphony, Repertoire, Echo, Sampling.

Amy is not a classically trained musician and uses a video editing software to almost write her compositions as an essay, she uses another DAW for effects and also pedals.

Vigil for Oro – simplicity of filmmaking, small military island, can navigate with eyes closed because off how small the island is, torch light filming which gave. it an uncanny digital feel, romantic science of isolation, expedition

Black Hole Cinema (RCA) – Astronomy and cinema, observatory, black hole fishing (if energy runs out we can harvest. energy from black holes, Adam brown), black holes are opposite of cinema, peppers ghost,

She used the audience as the soundtrack for a nature documentary, the audience produced unwanted sounds such as coughing, laughing, clearing throat, sneezing and the audience would get annoyed at these sounds as they thought they were interrupting the film when really they were providing the soundtrack. This made me think about how I could sue the audience as part of my piece.

David Toop – Sinister Resonance, The woods show to me answer and the echo rings. “Rain and tears are the same” , rain has became so polluted that the government predicts that none of it is safe.

Amy doesn’t look towards music as inspiration but looks at research in an unconventional way and does research on rain, black holes and nature instead.

Audio Paper Ideas

Emo: Origins, History and How the word got such a bad reputation.

Research:

Emo: how fans defined a subculture / Judith May Fathallah.

This book briefly touches on the history of “emo” music but

The book argues that the fans of emo music created a subculture with the use of sites such as MySpace, Youtube and Tumblr.

Nothing feels good : punk rock, teenagers, and emo / Andy Greenwald.

Script chapter ideas-

masculinity

meme culture

online forums

elitism

Whimsy Attic

Surrealism aims to revolutionise the human experience. It balances a rational vision of life with one that asserts the power of the unconscious and dreams. The movement’s artists find magic and strange beauty in the unexpected, uncanny, disregarded, and unconventional. At the core of their work is the willingness to challenge imposed values and norms, and a search for freedom.

Step into a world where imagination knows no bounds and dreams come alive in a stunning virtual reality experience. In this captivating adventure, players will be transported to an attic filled with immersive objects that hold the keys to surreal dreamscapes, waiting to be unlocked.

Imagine standing in the centre of a room surrounded by a diverse array of fascinating objects—a breathtaking painting that seems to pulsate with life, an ancient book whispering forgotten tales, and a mysterious computer glowing with untold secrets. Each object holds a portal to a unique and mesmerising dream world, where reality bends and dreams become tangible.

Conclusion of unit

I have found this unit very enjoyable and it has been very good to work in a group as I am not normally involved in group work for my creative practises. If I could do the unit again I would spend more time creating sounds with other team members as I only really did this during the end of the unit and it was really fun and helped me improve on the work I was doing by getting another person’s point of view on the work. I also wish I had used more of the university’s resources and used the multitrack recorders more when recording samples so that I could have easily recorded the sounds for the space. I think that in the future I will engage myself in group work a lot more as I really liked the creativity that it brought out of me.

Creative Sound Work Progress

For my creative sound piece I am going to make a piece of sound that would accompany my essay. I am going to mix together and slow down some of the songs that made Chicago drill what it is today and add my own twist on them. I am going to slow down and strip specific frequencies from the songs and try to turn them into a more ambient piece.

For the piece I have been inspired by artists such as Brian Eno, Merzbow and GodSpeed You! Black Emperor. I have been listening to these artists a lot in my own time and wanted to create this piece with them being my influence.

I didn’t want to make the piece too long and I wanted to make it as long as a regular drill song (2-3 minutes). It was quite hard to make the piece memorable because it was only that long.

For this unit I have mainly focused on the essay and that has taken up most of my though process and I sort of left the creative sound piece to the end as normally I find making sound pieces a lot easier. I found writing the essay really difficult as its hard for me to direct all my attention onto one thing. Overall I think I should have directed more of my focus towards the sound part of the hand this part of term instead of focusing on the essay.

Post-production: Mixing for VR and Integrating Assets

Beautiful psychedelic sound produced by movement and produces visual with VR headset. Leslie Deere. Long droning sounds that change slightly over time. this is inspiring for my VR sound work as it makes me think about how we could use the form of movement within the experience to create, manipulate and edit sound. Colour theory, therapeutic use of colours and sound.

Encoding formats – Vorbis defaults to 37%, AT9, Opus looses compression to 63%

Loading modes – Assets with compressed loading modes are loaded within the beginning. Decompressed are modes are decompressed into memory when loading. Streaming loading mode are continuously loaded, might buffer.

Potential disconnect between the sound and the experience. Disassociation.

Sound and the flow of time. Music can make time go faster but doesn’t change the immersive-ness. However sound effects can make the experience more immersive.

Vorbis Streaming.

In Virtual Reality the panning is replaced with HRTF, more accurate directional cues. Distance Attenuation. For VR should master with head tracking, how the mix works with head tracking.

DearVR. Oculus VST.

More effects ,more buffering.

Decolonising VR and Industry Working Practices

Ethics within VR, when creating our project we should abide by ethics followed in the real world within our project. We have to keep our integrity and not create anything that would make others uncomfortable or offended.

Uncanny valley – how humanlike robots can elicit an emotional response to an object/robot. Takashi Minato coined the term and created a scale to show how as AI/Robotics get realer our reactions and responses to them change and we get progressively weary and uncomfortable with the object if it looks too real and not right. He found that there are robots and objects that we are comfortable with such as teddy bears, non-realistic robots and the bunraku puppet which is a traditional Japanese puppet with a humanlike face that people in black body suits control.

Unreal Engine have created the MetaHuman which is an engine that can easily scan human expressions and facial features within minutes and then transfer them into the engine so that they can be warped and changed to be suitable for film, video games and other forms of media. The models look scarily realistic and play into the Uncanny Valley theory.

Sonic sensibility

Escher effect

VR being used in health industry, doctors being trained in VR, VR can be used as therapy and can be used to treat PTSD with veterans to take them more comfortable and accepting to their past experiences that might be negatively effecting them in the present.

Forensic architecture is a site ran by Goldsmiths university that uses technologies such as unreal engine to show various incidents of war and crime and shows you reenactments of events.

Meetings

Today we had a meeting on what we are going to do for the rest of the project. Rosa showed us what work she had done and we had a try at playing the work in progress experience on her headset. The sounds that have been integrated into the game have all been downloaded and our sounds are not in the game so far. I am going to start working on the sounds for the computer and bedroom sounds. I will need to make some ambient sounds, sounds for the guitar and piano.