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.