Month: January 2021

The last four or so months have my life have been uncomfortable to say the least. Taking a huge step and moving away from home for the first time, during a national lockdown has certainly been taking its toll on my mental health. The only true comfort is that I have met so many people in a similar situation to myself. I have battled BDD for as long as I can remember but have never faced it so intensely as I have during lockdown. I’ve been wanting to recognise these feelings artistically for a while and when the opportunity arose to create a sound piece, I decided to project these feelings in an artistic fashion.  I set out to create an intensely personal experience, however disturbing pulling these feelings out of an emotional well may be I found it to be empathic and utterly comforting. I’ve always struggled with letting others know about my personal struggles – perhaps it comes from my destructively masculine, traditionalist roman catholic background – a trait I’ve learned to let go of – now absolutely respecting the importance of humility.

How could I create something impactful, sympathetic and personal without making it contrived? My first focus was creating an image board to help understand the texture of how I was feeling. These images are a visual map to guide me through the compositional and synthesis processes. Once I had collected an ample number of perfect images, I set out to experiment with synthesis.

For this project I was mainly using a mixture of Serum and Granulator II as well as processing field recordings. Granular synthesis was a fundamental to the project – giving me a sufficient amount of control while not sacrificing spontaneity. I granulated a lot of my vocal as well as the field recordings to create strange, distorted textures akin to my own body or voice being manipulated due to illness in real life. I created a hollow bass using the fantastic wave table synthesiser Serum. Using metallic sounds, I had recorded on London Bridge I began to process and warp them before loading them onto the synthesiser and creating a bass I felt represented me.

The harmony and melody within the I felt to be piece is taunting and sarcastic, mixing well with the broken beats and distorted synthesis. The composition helped me convey an unsettling motion with a malicious attitude. I felt this to be totally representative. The motion of the piece is disorientating with a lot of swaying, sickly panning.

I truly feel like the chorus is the full representation of how I was feeling, I go as far as to call it “lamented” in my reflective writing and I do believe that is the best way to describe it. The sudden wall of distortion, screaming, granulated crying and unpredictability is a march from oneself and a commentary on the irony of a zoom CBT session. I love these sarcastic ideas in juxtaposition with true trauma and suffering.

I feel like my piece truly does convey how I felt, I feel like it’s sympathetic and in touch. In reflection I do wish I could of used more foley, maybe the synthesis could of used more polish. I do wish I could of added more lyrical content and more composition.

One of my favourite forms of sound design is Granular synthesis. Granular synthesis is quite an ambiguous term but can be fundamentally described as a process in which audio samples are broken down into tiny pieces of audio. These small segments are usually referred to as “grains”, according to Curtis Roads’ insightful study “Microsound” each grain will usually range from 1-100 milliseconds in length. Each grain does not have to be played in order and different grains can be played at the same time creating a “cloud” of audio which can prove to be incredibly textural. Each grain has a “Window” or envelope furthering the amount you can manipulate the sound.

My favourite trait to granular synthesis is how pliant and stretchy the audio feels. Granular synthesis opens a door to physical modelling which isn’t there for many other kinds of traditional synthesis methods. Granular synthesis allows a disconnect between both pitch and time which feels totally articulate. The seemingly endless possibilities with this method of sound design are fun and fascinating to me.

My favourite synthesiser to use to experiment with granular synthesis is a hybrid soft synth called POLYGON 2 by the incredible Glitchmachines. I will link some patches I’ve created using Granular synthesis and this VST. My favourite trait of this synth is that you can layer audio and granulate them all at once. I tend to make a lot of extreme sound so this felt perfect to me – although this synth can feel quite unintuitive, the UI is a bit messy and the modulating system doesn’t work or feel great.

The capabilities of Granular synthesis are unbound despite its trial and error ethos. I feel like this synthesis mode continues to be at the forefront of cutting-edge sound design, constantly appearing in artists I would consider to be the best synthesis designers at the moment; SOPHIE, ARCA, OPN, FKA Twigs, WWWings etc.

Granular Synthesis Demo: