Feeling for Sound- Further Research

Based on the feedback I got for Beyond the Boundaries, I am doing some of the further research that was suggested on my feedback to be able to expand my project.

David Toop-

David Toop is a musician/composer, a writer and a curator who works as a sound artist and as a visiting professor at the University of the Arts in London. My initial research led me to a short interview that was done with him that I found on vimeo. it detailed what he does, where he is working currently and his methods of working. In this video he detailed quite a few interesting thoughts on sound design. he mentioned sound never being in existence. It is always in a state of emergence and decay. He also does a lot of improvisation sessions at the University of the Arts using anything available. He also mentioned a sense of ambience being just about discovered by the wider sound community, and the exploration of it being made of more importance in recent times.

This is the video:

Following on from this I looked up some of his work to see how his theory has been put into his practical work.

The first piece I viewed was Decomposition/Decay which is a sound piece that appears to use instruments and foley to create the piece. The main thing I saw in this was the idea of ambience that he spoke of. The piece is never silent, even in the quieter moments there is always some slight rumble or noise in the piece. For me it is something that I am looking into creating as nothing is ever silent. There is always a slight ambience in a place and I find that particularly fascinating. You can listen to this piece here:

The second piece I looked at was a far more digitally created sounding piece called Tricyrtis Latifolia. This piece includes some voice work and some foley, but it sounds far more digitally created, with a lot of static and interference type sounds. What I see in this, in terms of Toop's working methods is the idea of emergence and decay. In this piece there are lots of sounds coming and going, not necessarily the same sounds either, although as in the previous piece there is always sound in the piece. You can listen to this piece here:

I love the mash up of different kinds of sound design, from digital creation to foley recordings of sounds. Also, the idea that there may have been improvisation elements to this is exciting to me, as the acoustics and results created on that day may always be slightly different depending on who was in the room, what equipment was in there, whether outside sources affected the recordings etc. In terms of my own project, it gives me something to think about in terms of the ambience at the time of recording. I am trying to recreate atmospheres and feelings from the past, partly using ambience, and I need to consider how spaces are going to sound and affect the sound design as a whole.

Indiegogo Fundraising and Trailer/Pre-visualization for Debbie

During all the script writing duties, the rest of the team were working hard making mock storyboards and production breakdowns, working on budgeting etc. We are wanting to raise £1500 for this film and to do this we wanted to make a trailer to give people an idea of what the film would look like, the tone and style and what it is about.

The experience of doing a pre-visualization was good as it allowed us to try out shots we might find difficult and also allowed Thomas to try out some of the VFX for the film and see how that could be created, how long it would take in post etc. Shahid also got an idea of how it should be lit to achieve the effect that I had envisioned. In general it gave a good idea of how much time each shot would take us. All in all it was a good experience.

This is the end result of the video:

In addition to this, we also took photographs of each Team member with information about them, and information about the film. With indiegogo, you can also give people perks dependent on how much money they donate which we will factor into our budget.

We have also launched a Facebook page for people to be able to get updates on our project and what we are up to. Both of these things can be accessed here: 

https://www.facebook.com/debbieFilm/?fref=ts

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/d-eb31e/x/12822846#/

Script Development- Implementation of Feedback and Group Feedback.

After my meeting with Craig, I immediately went back and implemented what he had suggested, especially in terms of structure and it made the film 100% better for it. It flows much better and makes much more sense because of it. At a point I was happier with it, I had a tutorial with Kathleen where she went through some things on the script:

• Amy should be called Jen
• Jarvis wouldn’t wear a watch
• More natural dialogue (Jarvis and Pete)
• Jarvis should look at Debbie on a tablet
• Get rid of toilet scene, drug should be taken in the cafe
• Try the film with and without the narration as it gives away too much of the plot.
• Should get rid of coffee shot at the beginning because people think waitress is main character.
• Shahid’s storyboards don’t match the atmosphere of the film, he needs to meet with Tom more to discuss how shots are set up for VFX.

I went back over and changed some of the things Kathleen said, but I didn't agree with everything she suggested. Then I let the rest of the group have a look. 

Laura gave me a pdf with a lot of notes on, mostly small things to do with dialogue re-wording, and minor details. She had some concerns about the ending, but I disagreed and sent an email to Craig asking for his opinion. He said it was solid, and Laura had a re-read and she agreed that it wasn't as bad as she thought. 

The rest of the group seem to have the same concerns. Shahid mentioned that he didn't like the flashbacks at the end, and felt that it was too 'Fight Club' and that we should have a transition shot instead. Also Lauren voiced a concern about the beginning scene in terms of style and it fitting with the rest of the film.

I agreed with most of what was said by the group, and liked the idea of the transition shot that Shahid mentioned. I also understood Lauren's concern and aim to have a conversation with Shahid to see how it could be lit and shot to allow it to be consistent stylistically. I now think the script is getting to a point of being something that everyone is happy with. Which is perfect and on schedule.

Script Development- Meeting with Craig

After a couple of re-writes of the script, Kathleen sorted out a tutorial with Craig Jordan Baker, the creative writing lecturer on campus to look at my script and give me some feedback on it. I found the meeting very helpful and it really helped me look at the script in a different way. The topics we discussed were:

-Structure
-Dialogue
-Scriptwriting format/technique
-General Feedback

The main thing that was brought up in this meeting was to do with the structure of the script. The structure of it meant that there was too much setup to the story and the ending felt rushed if we were to make a 15 minute film. So his advice was that I introduced Pete's character in a lot earlier, with an establishing scene with him to allow the audience to know why Jarvis is waiting in the cafe and to set up their relationship faster, then to have him arrive by page 4. They then have conversation, and Jarvis is starting to come around to Pete's way of thinking by page 7. This then allows more time for the story to resolve.

The next thing was the actual scriptwriting format. I was writing a sort of mix between a spec script and a shooting script. What Craig advised that in order to focus on the story I leave the shots out at first and then come back to it later and do a full shooting script.

Another thing was that Debbie had more to say than she should have done. If Debbie is an extension of Jarvis's consciousness then she shouldn't say what he's thinking. She should say something that then leads on to him finishing the thought, but not necessarily finishing her sentence.

Other than a few other bits, I asked Craig what he thought of the script in general and he said it could be a strong short film if I got the structure right and improved on the areas we discussed.

'Wake Me Up'- BA Hons Animation Project

I was approached by my friend Tom on the animation course in 3rd year to work on a project called 'Wake Me Up' which is a short documentary style animation which surrounds the topic of sleep paralysis.

He sent me an email with a reference to a documentary on sleep paralysis, which has some sounds in that he was looking for in his work:

Once he had sent that email, a few days later he sent an animatic for his review with his lecturers for me to do sound design on. This piece very abstract and I really liked that I could create my own sound effects for it, based on the documentary he sent me. Which is in fact a very interesting documentary in it's own right. He said he really liked what I did with the sound, and now I have to wait for more animation from him.

Sound Design Research for Personal Project (2)

Following on from my other research, I wanted to look at the psychology of sound and how it affects you in mind and body.

Firstly I found a TED talk about how sound affects you in 4 different ways:

• Physiological- Breathing, heart rate, brainwaves, hormones
• Psychological- Emotional State
• Cognitively- You can't understand large amounts of sound at once.
• Behaviourally- fast paced music makes you drive faster, we leave when we hear pleasant sounds.

I can expand on different ways in which sound affects you and it will probably fall into one of those four categories.

Sound in language helps us read emotions just as we would read facial expressions. A study revealed that when people were exposed to a fearful sounding recording and a photograph of someone with a fearful look on their face, there was much more increased brain activity than if they were neutral.

There is also such a thing as conditioning with sound, which is manipulating memory to condition our emotions in response to certain events. For example, when you hear a piece of music and it reminds you of a particular time in your life. A rather cruel study done on rats where they were played a sound before being electrocuted over time showed the rats become fearful of that sound as they associated it with pain.

http://www.amplifon.co.uk/resources/impact-of-sound-on-the-brain/

When talking about how sound affects the brain we can again talk about binaural beats, and brain waves. When you play binaural beats at a particular frequency then you have an effect on the brain waves we produce. These then have an effect on how we feel. There are four categories of brain wave frequency:

Delta: associated with loss of awareness, deep sleep. Ranges from 0.1-3.9Hz.

Theta: Associated with deep relaxation, sleep. Ranges from 4-7.9Hz.

Alpha: Associated with relaxation while awake, dreaming, pre-sleep and pre-wake drowsiness. Ranges from 8-13.9Hz.

Beta: Associated with being active, busy, concentrated, survival, problem solving etc. Ranges from 14-30Hz.

These waves are often associated with spirituality, and meditation, but they do have their foundations in scientific research.

http://binauralbrains.com/brainwave-frequencies/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_beats

Sound doesn’t just affect your brain, it also affects your hormone releases. High pitched, panicked sounds like the sound of an alarm raises your heart rate and releases cortisol into your blood, which is the hormone that activates the feeling of fight or flight. In a similar vein, horror movies create tension using silence and very low frequency sounds to make you feel uncomfortable, and then breaking the tension with a release of cortisol using a jump scare.

I found a thread on a sound forum asking members what films made them feel the most uncomfortable which will aid me in my research on different sound design techniques and why they work so well:

http://sound.stackexchange.com/questions/7806/movies-made-to-make-you-feel-uncomfortable

Now I have done this research I feel more comfortable with piecing together what I want to do with my project.

Sound Research for Personal Project.

After my tutorial with Kathleen last week, where she gave me some suggestions for research, I went away and did some broad research around the topic I wish to base my project on.

I firstly researched Maryanne Amacher who was an American composer and sound designer who sadly died a few years ago. Her work was very site specific and she liked to incorporate the acoustics of a particular place in her work. She also used psychoacoustics to create auditory illusions in her work, namely, otoacoustic emissions which is mostly used for testing hearing. It is a sound which is given off by the inner ear when the ears are stimulated by sound. When you hear these sounds they feel as if they are coming from inside your head.

"When played at the right sound level, which is quite high and exciting, the tones in this music will cause your ears to act as neurophonic instruments that emit sounds that will seem to be issuing directly from your head ... (my audiences) discover they are producing a tonal dimension of the music which interacts melodically, rhythmically, and spatially with the tones in the room. Tones 'dance' in the immediate space of their body, around them like a sonic wrap, cascade inside ears, and out to space in front of their eyes ... Do not be alarmed! Your ears are not behaving strange or being damaged! ... these virtual tones are a natural and very real physical aspect of auditory perception, similar to the fusing of two images resulting in a third three dimensional image in binocular perception ... I want to release this music which is produced by the listener ..." (Maryanne Amacher)

Here is an example of a piece of work that includes this called Synaptic Island:

This led me to research other psychoacoustic illusions in connection to this one. One of which I found to have a similar kind of effect to the one above, which is called a Phantom Voice. This occurs when two tones are played or sung together and a third tone is produced, seemingly from a different source. It feels as if it is coming from the centre if you play both tones in separate ears. Here is an example of it:

If you listen closely you can hear a third higher tone here which does not exist in reality.

Your brain also perceives beats in sound if two tones are played at slightly different frequencies, with a difference of less than 30hz. This is because of the way your brain deals with the frequency difference of each tone which then allows you to hear a beat that isn't there. Here is an example of this:

The last illusion I looked at in depth is something called a scale illusion. It was discovered by a psychologist in 1973 called Diana Deutsch. The illusion starts with a scale, with low and high notes played into both ears respectively. The illusion makes it appear as if the high notes are played in one ear and the low notes are played in the other. In reality the scale is played with some highs in one ear and some in the left, and vice versa for the right. However the way our brain processes the sound makes it appear the way it does. Here is an example of it:

http://philomel.com/mp3/musical_illusions/Scale_illusion.mp3

Lastly I researched another artist called Karlheinz Stockhausen. He works in music, but unconventionally. A lot of his pieces focus on one or two aspects of sound, enhancing them and exploring them. I looked at a variety of his pieces but I found an article which spoke a bit about a particular one called Kontakte.

Karlheinz Stockhausen created a pivotal moment in the history of music with his work Kontakte (1958-1960). According to the composer, “In the preparatory work for my composition Kontakte, I found, for the first time, ways to bring all properties of sound [i.e. timbre, pitch, intensity and duration] under a single control.” The most famous moment, at 17:03 minutes, is a potent illustration of these connections. A high, bright tone descends in several waves, becoming louder as it gradually acquires a snarling timbre, and finally passes below the point where it can be heard any longer as a pitch. As it crosses this threshold, it becomes evident that the tone consists of pulses, which continue to slow until they become a steady beat.

This famous descending tone uncovers a fundamental understanding of our hearing. Once a tone passes below the threshold of 16 Hz we stop perceiving tone, and start to hear beats. The range of hearing was never explored in this way before this moment, because there was no instrument that could perform this frequency range. Up until that time, beats and tones were considered separate musical properties – and often they still are. Beats belong to the realm of rhythm and tempo, and tones to melody and harmony. With Kontakte, Stockhausen showed that beats and tones form a continuum, and the distinction between them is an illusion. It is exclusively due to the lower threshold in our hearing, whether we perceive sound as beats or tone.

Stockhausen worked with instruments and with electronic ways of creating sound, and it is understood that he paved the way for electronic music to come about. Here is Kontatke:

All of this research has given me some context into sound, and how it manipulates the body. Now I can think about how to draw up a plan for what I want to achieve with my own sound design.