White Noiz is a song that I found particularly inspiring during the composition of ‘Flick a Tooth’, I felt this track had a connection to themes I want to convey but in a more lamenting manor.
The game opens with a pallid skinned James, staring into a bathroom mirror, arrogated by grime and filth accompanied by the first track playing in the background – ‘White Noiz’. Immediately I am absorbed, the sound is to interestingly peculiar, the pads feel like their weeping, it has a sinister, mysterious comfort, it’s dreamily pitiful. I want to critically analyse ‘White Noiz’, I feel this track holds the secrets to how to create a space with such enthralling nature.
Akira Yamaoka (Silent Hill 2’s composer and lead sound designer) acts like an architect, connecting and painting with an acute meticulousness. He is constantly working to build both structure and the personalities within the world. Understanding and becoming totally in touch with what you are creating is an absolute fundamental to creating a world both tangible and holistic.
Strangely the pad has history with one of the most prolific synthesis designers of all time, Eric Persing – ex Roland chief sound designer, founder of Spectrasonics and creator of the highly acclaimed soft synth, Omnisphere. The pad comes from the Spectrasonics’ Distorted Reality series, in an interview with sound-on-sound Mr. Parsing details the creation of the samples for Distorted Reality stating,
“Many of the ambient sounds of Distorted Reality have no source at all but were generated by letting six or seven effects processors feedback on one another for hours. How? Subtly change the send levels to each feedback effect (which in turn feeds another effect and so on…) and then walk away – recording to hours of DAT tape. Come back with fresh ears in a few months and edit the best bits. Those beds can then be used as fresh source material for further processing and layering in a sampler or computer”.
I absolutely love this technique and find it eerily contextual to the world I wanted to create – leave the sound to itself and let ghostly chance take the reins, creating worlds with almost no human interaction – it is its own. This technique is closely related to the ethos of the Kierkegaard quote – chaos, unpredictability and meta-ness are all deeply rooted in what I want to convey. This technique became a major influence on how ‘Flick a Tooth’ was made and was directly inspired by ‘White Noiz’. I think using this technique I was able to create the densely, ghostly, chaotic world inspired by the quote