Category: Second Year

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.

Chicago Drill – Research

Recently I’ve been watching and listening to a lot of Chicago drill. I am going to change my essay subject to this as I was struggling to think about what to write for my psychedelic experience idea. There is a lot to unpack for Chicago drill and there are many books that I can use to help my research.

Ballad of the Bullet : Gangs, Drill Music, and the Power of Online Infamy by Forrest Stuart

The rap on gangsta rap : who run it? ; gangsta rap and visions of black violence / Bakari Kitwana.

Chicago hustle and flow [electronic resource] : gangs, gangsta rap, and social class.

The book starts by introducing the rapper Habit, from the Spanish Cobras. He starts by explaining how in jail no-one doubts your realness like they do when you’re out of jail.

Creativity and Research

What is creativity?

creative – “to bring into being”

intertextuality Julia Kristeva. ideas are being recycled and influenced by artists predecessors

What constitutes an original work?

everything is a citation.

How might artistic work be research?

Tacit Knowledge (Polanyi 1966) We can know more than we can tell.

Julian Henriques Sonic Bodies

Sonic Knowledge – Knowledge is related to sound

Lawrence Abu Hamdan – Saydnaya (the missing 19dB) 2017. – Worked with Amnesty International and Forensic Architecture to produce an acoustic investigation into the Syrian regime prison, where over 13,000 people have been executed since 2011.

George Brecht – Drip Music (1959) – Performance with water dripping into a container.

Fluxus

Group Work –

Sacred Frequencies XOSAR

Audrey Chen

Glacial by Audrey Chen is a live recording of “unprocessed cello, voice and analog electronics”. The recording starts off with a repeating cello riff that raises and lowers in intensity, it lowers in intensity and is this accompanied by the sound of almost a single note on a bass guitar and as this comes in the cello notes start to change and the playing gets more and more intense. Beautiful vocals almost Bjork like then accompany the playing. I really enjoyed the end of the piece where it got more noisy and was surprised at how she got her instruments to sound that fuzzy without effects.

I was surprised by the modulation that she was able to do with her vocals without using processing, at parts of the recording it sounded as if she was using distortion and looping processing. This was inspiring for my final piece as it made me think of how I could use vocals and warp voices without processing.

Derek Baron

Listening to “Curtain” by Derek Baron released on the 7th of August 2020, I was inspired and influenced by the rawness and almost vulgarity of the recordings which sounded as if they were cut up and stitched together in a beautiful way. I liked the gaps in-between the ever evolving instrumental. I was inspired by this and I think it would be god to take inspiration from this for my creative sound piece that I have to create for this unit. I was thinking I could cut up tape and play around with timing for the final piece as this is something I haven’t got round to doing and would be a good experimentation to see what I could come up with.

I also listened to the piece “Recollects”, the piece starts of with two old people who are suspected to be seen on the cover mid conversation talking about Vitamin C and the grocery store. The piece starts of very intimate and is almost was if you’re in their living room and intruding within their conversation, it feels as if you shouldn’t be listening. They then start talking about travelling and a man that we are not familiar with. The conversation then cuts out and sounds as if someone was on a boat (like the cover), you can hear the water and I suspect Baron and his father talking, I presume it is a father and son fishing bonding session.

I really liked the intimacy of this piece and the way Baron was able to create a feeling of intrusion from the listener, this was done by the way the conversation starts midway and cuts out midway. I also really liked the minimal editing style and that he probably cut up raw recordings and didn’t do much post production with them. I could use inspiration from this as normally I am an over-editor and tend to ruin work with editing it too much so that you can’t make out the original recordings.

Anthropology of Sound

Anthropology is the study of human development and culture.

Ethnography – the systematic study of individual cultures. a branch of anthropology.

Minimally ethnography

Sensory ethnography

https://medium.com/@SandeepPrakash/interpreting-ritual-trance-musicking-a-literature-review-9f6bdb5e3376

“Disciplinary developments in the field of anthropology has molded Western ethnographic work that sought to describe meaning and symbols within specific cultural trance practices. Anthropology has also profoundly influenced the other fields — religious studies and ethnomusicology — considered in this review.”

Autoethnography

Surrealism VR Research

Sothebys – Masters of Surrealism: This is a non-interactive experience that showcases surrealist art. You are taken through art pieces by Salvador Dali, Paul Delvaux, Andre Masson and Rene Magritte. The experience was made by Sothebys a fine arts company and used to advertise the art pieces that they have for sale. The experience was good but lacks the interactivity that we want to include in ours.

Non-Linear Narrative and Introduction to FMod

Spirit of place – The only time I have truly felt spirit of space within a man made structure has been at Segrada Famillia in Barcelona, Spain. The building was made by Antoni Gaudi in 1882. When stepping inside it is as if you are at one with god and is very spiritual, no other building has ever made me feel like this.

Our VR experience is going to be linear and the player is going to have to go through the rooms to progress within the experience, therefore we are going to follow a linear sound structure and sounds will play as the player interacts or passes items within the experience.

Ambisonics order – how many microphones we’re using. 0,1,2,3. Mono Audio is ambisonics on level 0

A-Format vs B-Format

XYZW – Up, Down, Left, Right, Width

What is Ambisonic(s)?
• Surround recording and playback technique, Michael
Gerzon 1970s
• Little commercial success so far, patents expired
• Independent of playback loudspeaker configuration,
scaleable
• 2D and 3D sound-fields can be synthesized

Dissertation Proposal

Route A – Dissertation (6,000-8,000 words)

Route B – Audio Paper (30-40 minutes) – A piece of audio that follows the form of an essay

Audio Paper Manifesto –

  1. The audio paper affords performative aesthetics.
  2. The audio paper is idiosyncratic.
  3. The audio paper is situated and partial.
  4. The audio paper renders affects and sensations.
  5. The audio paper is multifocal; it assembles diverse and often heterogeneous voices.
  6. The audio paper has multiple protagonists, narrators and material agencies.
  7. The audio paper brings aesthetics and technologies together in mediation.
  8. The audio paper is a constituent part of larger ecologies.

Ideas for dissertation –

Give three advantages to writing a dissertation –

  1. You are using the language of intellectuals

Give three advantages of making an audio paper –

  1. It is easily accessible
  2. You can use sound to

Describe three ways in which the two research routes are similar and three ways in which the two research routes are different.

What is your question?

How does noise and sound effect the aesthetic of underground Japanese cinema of the 90s.

What would your question sound like as an audio paper?

Film sounds, interviews, documentary, field recordings, foley

Sonic practises of resistance and activism

The psychological and human brain effects of music in combination with psychedelic drugs Mendel Kaelen 2017

“Music may be a human invention, but if so, it resembles the ability to make and control fire: it is something we invented that transforms human life. Indeed, it is more remarkable than fire making in some ways, because not only is it a product of our brain’s mental capacities, it also has the power to change the brain. It is thus emblematic of our species’ unique ability to change the nature of ourselves.”

Aniruddh D. Patel

This paper covers the interaction in the mind between music and psychedelic drugs. The paper is very science based as it was published to Imperial College London and includes a lot of tests that were done on patients that were given placebos and LSD and were tested with and without music.

Start of Essay –

Title – The effects of Psychedelia with Sound.

Psychedelics have a profound effect on culture and the psyche. They have been prevalent within mainstream culture since the first synthesis of LSD by Albert Hoffman in 1938.

As psychedelic drugs are illegal and inaccessible in most countries this has made it impossible for scientists to do research on them as they cannot publish their papers.

The

Preproduction: Spatialisation and Sound Assets

For our project we have chose to focus on surrealism art and paintings. We have been inspired by artists such as Dali and Magritte. For my research I have been looking into pre existing surrealist VR experiences such as Ixian Gate and Dreams of Dali. Ixian Gate has really inspired me as I love the psychedelic drug-simulating visuals.

I have also done research on the concept of surrealism and the conscious and unconscious.

Dada what is art

Inside ‘Ixian Gate’ – An Otherworldly, Surrealist Dream Come to Life