Month: February 2021

During a project meeting, we had begun to flesh the project out as well as allocate roles. I opted for the role of manipulating Cindy’s voice – I thought it sounded like fun as well as challenging, I also felt like it played to my strengths coming for a synthesis and noise music background. Originally, we had planned to sample words from other interviews then splice and warp them out to accommodate the script as well as normal ‘influencer’ speaking patterns. To do this I had planned to lay the sampled word above an interview and stretch the word to fit the speech pattern. I found this process to create a strange uncanny valley type androgynous personality which we felt was perfect for the character, although as interesting as it was, it was incredibly time consuming and with such a short time span for the project, this idea became unfeasible. To combat this, Raul managed to get his sister to record the parts for Cindy while Daniel played the part of the interviewer. This worked well and the Woman playing Cindy sounded perfect for the role. Now my part was to use a multitude of production techniques and effects to warp and distort Cindy’s voice into the strange, vapid personality in the script

Using Debord’s writing as a framework for the sound I began editing the audio in particular ways to achieve strange and mostly unpredictable effects. I began by splicing the particular words I wanted to manipulate. I started by manipulating a few words at the start of the piece, gradually adding more manipulation as the piece progresses. We wanted a gradual progression of manipulation and a huge noisy climax – we liked the idea of building a tense uncertainty as we felt it complimented the themes of the piece. The main tools I used for manipulating the speech was M4L Grainscanner, Ableton warping tools, EQ, Compression, Ableton Reverb, Simpler, Pitch shifting, Panning, re-sampling and layering audio. The most powerful and my favourite tool was the M4L Grainscanner, I love the unpredictability and glitchiness of the VST – I felt like using this technique gave us the ability to warp the dependence of Cindy’s self-image.

I then began to record effects in real time over the original Cindy audio, this added a serious unpredictability with the Grainscanner which I found to be incredibly fun as well as fruitful, throughout the piece and closer to the end alien-like sound artefacts and warps can be heard all over the audio – this is exactly the kind of manipulation we had in mind for the piece.

I love how the piece descends into chaos and there is almost a tape like warping present – the glossy irony of the crescendo worked well. I did have trouble getting things to work and would have preferred a more streamlined approach to manipulating the audio, although if I had more time I would have preferred to work with the original idea and create something more Dadaist.

Today we had to opportunity to gather as a group and brainstorm ideas for a radio project. We all agreed that we wanted to touch on contemporary themes which formed the foundation for our brainstorming ideas to grow. We wanted to do something deconstructive, using false convictions and uncertainty to create an ambiguous and Dadaist radio experience. Personally, I loved this direction – a radio show that takes inspiration from Burroughs’ cut up technique really intrigued me – I felt like it was a powerful way to comment on the ego-centric radio personality we had begun to concoct.

In the coming weeks we decided to base our radio play around Guy Debord’s “La Société du Spectacle” (1967)”. One of the most important themes we aimed to explore with “Just Cindy” was Marx’s Commodity fetishism

Debord’s commentary on commodity fetishism was the blueprint for our piece. We used Debord’s and Marx’s writing as a guide to create an interview between two fictional characters we had created – “The Interviewer” and “cindy”. Debord states, “… just as early industrial capitalism moved the focus of existence from being to having, post-industrial culture has moved that focus from having to appearing.” This quote is the framework for Cindy’s personality – her conceited nature and vain disposition is a mirror image of reification.

Marx describes the capitalist mode of production as presenting itself as “an immense accumulation of commodities,” its unit being a single commodity.”, further explaining “A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another. The nature of such wants, whether, for instance, they spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no difference. Neither are we here concerned to know how the object satisfies these wants, whether directly as means of subsistence, or indirectly as means of production”.

How can we convey this critique – what does the contradictory essence and appearance of commodity sound like? I began automatically writing ideas – underlying industrial soundscapes with clouds looming over glossy, vocal harmonizers and noisy chatter – stretchy, stuttering conversations I wanted to peel back and peer into. Commodity and reification are a giggling smear that I find myself more often than not trying to chuckle with rather than at – this was the main idea I had implanted while I was working with sound and automatic synthesis

Today I had the pleasure of experiencing a Locustream during one of Dawn Scarfe’s lectures. We tested and experimented with setting up and listening to streams from both around the world and from my own classmates. I set up my livestream using the locus sonus app, propped my phone up with a pillow and pointed it down into the busy Dalston high street.

I then began to listen to my own stream very closely for about five – ten minutes. It felt strange – I could hear words and phrases mixed in with the passing of buses, cars and the occasional doink and flop of a car driving over the loose manhole on the tarmac. I felt like a ghost, listening so intently – closing my eyes, hovering over the red kebab shop canopy – occasionally hearing a flutter of fabric and a squeak from the hinges. Initially the experience was incredibly connective – but I wanted to experiment with what it would feel like if I disconnected – forcing my brain not to recognise familiar sounds and using them in my own soundscape. Suddenly the familiar buses and cars chugging by become an alien language, the squeaking hinge becomes electricity, the talking becomes a strong breeze. I loved this experiment; I have found it incredibly useful and stimulating – especially when faced with a creative block.

We then began to listen to streams from around the world. We experimented by mixing multiple streams at once to create our own strange and alien environments – suddenly the electric sounds of a wave farm and a huge whistling sand dune is on a busy street in Camberwell. I’ve found these experiments to be incredibly stimulating – I never realised how deeply connected you could become with your surroundings and how it can be used as a tool to paint otherworldly, dreamy soundscapes.

The BBC’s Touching the Elephant was a documentary in which four blind people encounter an Elephant named Dilberta at London Zoo. The idea for the documentary comes from a widely diffused Indian folktale in which a group of blind men conceptualise an elephant by touching each part of its body.

I found this documentary to be particularly moving and thought provoking. Imagining what something looks like from nothing is an alien, confusing and strange to think about – it is exciting and imaginative but strange. Bonnie M Miller states that “Pictures are better on the radio”, this is a beautiful thought – this made me think about how focusing down on one sense can be an incredible imaginative tool. Through this piece I’ve found that the real beauty of radio is that you’re forced into this – nearly obstruction like mode, which is totally creatively stimulating