Author: Tata Cheng

Sound is the media that different from other arts form which is not based of the visual (films, fine art, etc). Through music and sound, audiences can be in the places of their imagination and this more ambiguous way to present our own idea. I am not good at present myself thpouhgt language, therefore I started to write music and Folk, Blues and rock music seems to talk to me most when I started to learn music. For music, Syd Barrett, Nick Drake and John Lennon inspired me a lot. By listen to their work, the idea of minimalism is interested me most where it gives more space for the audience to wander around the pieces. My works always reflecting the things around me and the alternative lifestyle seems to the topic that at the top of my mind in recent years. Think the alternative way to live rather just stick in the city and forget the fundamental element of living where in the urban lifestyle, those element are being transfer to money. By doing that, field recording is the tools that I found can be present this idea where it can capture the soundscape of city and the nature. Therefore, field recording is the area that I start to dive in and hopefully there will be more field recording related composition in my future works.

For the sound artist who always inspired me is Hildegard Westercamp. She is the one who start my interest in field recording. The Kits Beach Soundwalk piece strike me when the first time I listen it. Both concept of playing with the beast (the city) and the way she delivers it are very interesting. Firstly the concept of playing with the beast reminded me how I can interrupt the chaotic city sounds differently. In the past, I always annoyed by the city sounds, the cars, the machine on the street, the noise that people make on the street. It’s too overwhelming! But she reminded me how we can play with it after the refreshing. Then the way she presented it is incredible! She just used the filter to guide the audience from the chaotic urban soundscape to the tiny tingling barnacles sounds, then bring us back to the city!

After finished all the recording from VCV and all the effect editing, I start to do mixing by using the monitors at home where all the previous process were doing with headphones. First, I did the EQ of every tracks. Some of the track like the duck and bird songs were recorded in Victoria Park, therefore, I tried to use EQ to filter out background noise. Although record with a shotgun mic already help a lot, compare to the previous project, which I used Zoom H5 mic and the XY figuration wasn’t directional enough for record animal sounds. The other goal of my EQ process is to emphasis the characters of the tracks. For example, the narrowboat engine, I reduce the high and increase a little bit of low frequency which make it more bassy and save the high frequency for the bird and watery sounds. Finally, I level every tracks and balance every tracks amplitude.

After all the processes, I bounce it out and listen it again and again, and listen it back when I was out or even at home. The problem of levelling keeps came up, so I have to go back and change them. The final piece is different from what I thought in the beginning where it is more liner rather than whirlpool or circles due to the limitation of using LFO. LFO have a smoother modulation of the playing speed but it created the liner feeling and turns out it is more like a wave. But the main goal of the composition, which is messing with the time, are achieved.

The psychoacoustic that I have tried in the piece is the panning and time difference. For the panning part, I used auto panning in Ableton and automate the rate of it. I slowly increase the rate as the forward & backward process speed up. It emphasises the swirling effect and created a bigger senses of space when put all the recording together.

For the time difference, instead of decompose one voice into more voices like Steve Reich ‘s Come out, I put the forward sound on one sounds and the reverse on another side, and both have the same rate of panning. As a result, one ears is listen forward and another is the reverse and both keep spinning around. As more close toward the ending, the panning and forward& backward effects are more intense which for me, have the increase the heart beat and create an anxiety like effects. Time is the main theme of my composition, and hopefully the audiences can get lost in time.

Modular synth is one of the thing that I wanted to learn but It seems complicated to start to me. To step out the comfort zone, I used VCV to create the piece. VCV is a virtual modular synthesiser programme where they are open sources, therefore, they have a lot of difference modules in their library. I used multi-head sampler oscillator called MusicalBox by NYSTHI to play all the recording I choose from the field recording trips and I used BlackHole to send all tracks’ output into Ableton Live.

The real challenge is how to use control voltage to create the forward and backward effect while gradually increasing the speed of this process. At first, I found a 31 steps circle sequencer which I thought it would work to create this effect. But the problems is when I use sequencer, the differences of every steps can be hear which lost the graduate moving effect.

Finally, I found just go back to basic and use a slow LFO to create this effect. Firstly, connect a slow normal LFO to the speed of sampler oscillator, when the LFO is in negative, it would reverse; when positive, it would go forward. Then connect that LFO into a clock and control the modulated the clock speed with another slow LFO, however, the cycle of normal LFO is not long enough for that. Eventually, I found a Seriously Slow LFO by Frozen Wasteland which can create whatever minute long LFO and I feed this into the clock to module the speed and gradually increase the speed of the first LFO.

One of the theme that my classmate comes up for the collaborative release is step out of comfort zone, therefore, I borrowed different gears from ORB for this recording trip. For recorder, I used Sound Device Mix-pre 6 which have much better quality pre-amp compare to Zoom H5. For microphones, I used Sanken CMS 50 which I never used any mid-side microphones before that. Hence, before that, I did some research of mid-side mics and try to understand how it work. At first, I thought the Side mic can capture stereo audio but turn out it is just a  Figure-8 pattens which they don’t device as left or right. Another issues is the decode but luckily Mix-pre have build in MS decode which save some time for post production.

For the recording location, I followed the canal next to my home and it leaded me to Victoria Park. I recorded a lot of bird songs and duck sounds there. When I was leaving the park, I found there is a small pipe in the canal where they have interesting watery bubble sounds. By using CMS 50 and Mix-pre 6, I can capture it clearly and it sounds like the waterfall on headphone where in real life, it just a tiny little sounds. Then I kept following the canal and found there is one narrowboat with a quite loud engine and this reparative low frequency attract me to record it from distance. Then I found Mile End Park where is much more quite and have different duck spice.

I created two graphic score during the lesson and both of them are like whirlpool. They are not like the traditional music score where start from left to right, they are going around circles and sucking into middle like a black hole. If we follow the pattern of this ‘whirlpool’, it creates infinity where we can’t see the end of the line and we can’t see the beginning as well, or to be precise, the line can be extend infinitely. Both graphic scores also are extendable which created second layer it.