Author: Emmanuel Neill

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:

On the tube home from today’s class my thoughts became cluttered with questions about the attraction to and point of Power Electronics. This was a genre I had always found my heart and ears drawn to. I want to examine how and why I find this genre so important and inspiring to me. I want to analyse one of my favourite tracks in the genre, explaining how and why it is important.

The track I want to talk about is Pharmakon’s “Vacuum”, a noisy, anxiety inducing CBT therapy like session. The 1:31 long track begins with a quick, deep, clear sequence of breaths, then joined by a spiky pure minimal synth tone, the tone slowly rising in both pitch and volume – then a quick sequence of breaths over the original speedy pounding in and exhales – at this point my chest is feeling tight, I find myself unconsciously following the quick sequences and in turn, inducing finger numbing hyper ventilation. Another sequence of poly-rhythmic heavy breathing is then blended in, the track continuing to an anxious crescendo. Everything is nauseously swelling. Suddenly the tone pitch drops down and the breathing is slower, reduced to deeper, exhausted inhales –  you feel like you are catching your breath again with Margaret Chardiet. Breathing with the track does induce an anxiety attack – this was one of the most intense times I ever experienced music’s physical meta-ness – I was fascinated by this – how someone could use music to physically hurt someone?

To this day I find the experience tightening my chest and slicking my palms with a layer of sweat. Being in this, is totally connective to me, totally important and inspiring. I use techniques similar to this in my own work, experimenting with ghost tones and binaural technique to induce nausea or anxiety. Why would I do this though? Being able to control people’s physicality with sound interests me and allows me to be in a position to more impactfully convey a message. DJ’s like the acclaimed Paula Temple use techniques like these all throughout their live sets, sneakily playing a theta frequency under her main beats to help encourage a feeling of euphoria in the crowd.

I’ve always been inhumanly attracted to any kind of intense artistic experience, whether it be Basinski or Wormrot – to me, intensity unlocks connectivity.

During my listening through of the Sonic Doing and Thinking playlist I stumbled upon “Pain of Glass! Justice Yeldham at Club 85” and was immediately smitten. I was fascinated by the tumbling wales and howling of a person quivering a piece of glass with their mouth – biting and slicing their cheeks in the process. My interest was peaked when they proceeded to smash the piece of glass over their head. I love the guttural energy, the huge fuzzy tones and vocoded vibrations – but immediately I thought “How could someone capture this energy into a record?” surly this is a sonic spectacle, the records must be underwhelming.

While researching Justice’s work I suddenly remembered hearing rumblings of their music before – akin to “A guy who plays a piece of glass is going to be on a Death Grips record” I remember hearing that his recorded work was good, I was excited to check it out – but the question remained – can a piece that’s mostly spectacle still translate well onto recorded music, when the visual substance isn’t there to contribute?

In Justice’s case – kind of. Justice’s most acclaimed record “Cicatrix” feels like 60% fun, noisy, spikey textures and the remainder is filled with boring and usual noise. I don’t think this makes Justice’s work any less impactful – they are still a fantastic sound artist with great visceral ideas and sounds. I feel like Justice offers work that’s uncontrived, fun to watch and sometimes fun to listen to – overall I’ve found that in their performance, the spectacle tends to pick up the slack when the audio is lacklustre – it would be unfair to judge their work on audio alone. I learned a lot from Justice’s art, especially about how to incorporate spectacle into my own performance and using different found or reclaimed objects to record with. I’m certainly looking forward to more work from them.

Darsha Hewitt is a Canadian artist with her main practices focusing on Sonic and Upscaled art. She primarily works electronics, sculpting and reclaiming them to create strongly political and environmental statements. Availability and experimentation seem to be key within Hewitt’s work, scavenging and reclaiming electronics – this practice seems to be intrinsically linked to Dr. Ursula Franklins theory. Hewitt talks about being heavily influenced by Dr. Ursula Franklin who suggests “that to critically examine technology, it must be looked at as a comprehensive human led practice akin to domesticity, culture or democracy.” Hewitt uses this to demystify technology so that it can be examined more comprehensively. I find this process to be inspiring – especially her sporadic and reclaiming attitude towards electronics – I feel it offers real insight to wasteful capitalistic habit.

My favourite Hewitt piece has to be “Feedback babies”. Feedback babies uses vintage fisher- price nursery monitors, when they are in proximity the devices produce a feedback uncanny to the crying of a baby. Darsha uses an “electromechanical sound apparatus that makes use of slow-moving motors to automate these transmitters in order to create nuanced feedback patterns.”  I found feedback babies to be incredibly inspiring, coaxing ideas about the context between technological reliance and the antediluvial practices of parental responsibility. The constructed simulation of an artificial baby’s whine I think demonstrates a lot of Darsha’s philosophical interests. My least favourite piece was probably “Operation Manual”. Operation Manual is a photographic collage that reframes user manuals for the Trolli 35 Lawnmower – a standard lawn mowers made and used in the former German Democratic Republic. Darsha injects incredible life into these machines in her pieces – “sirens”, “Armour” and “The Watch”, but operation manual feels uninteresting in comparison.

Darsha’s work has inspired me and opened me up to another way of creating and reclaiming art. I feel her social and environmental statements are incredibly moving. I love thinking about re-valuing objects and giving them new personality and use – this is something I’m definitely going to be exploring in my own work.

First link is from the Finnish, Berlin based duo Amnesia Scanner. The slick, sticky vocals and pads mixed with the sawey, granulated synth leads is utter textural chaos. To me their music is an untainted, tumultuous introspective into zoomer interconnectivity and ubiquity

Amnesia Scanner:

Second and third links are from one of my favourite Japanoise outfits  – The Gerogerigegege. The group was a vessel for the anomalous Juntaro Yamanouchi, who oddly stated that the outfit was birthed from a mutual love of noise music and The Ramones. Long standing member, GERO 30’s involvement came when he was picked up by Juntaro at an S&M club, while other long time member, DEDE GERO is a shoe maker (now Youtube shoe reviewer). The bizarre history of the Gero is almost as interesting as their works! One of the main proponents in The Gerogerigegege’s live performances was GERO 30’s exhibitionism, often leading to extremely intense and unsettling live scenes.

The Gerogerigegege live:

The Gerogerigegege recorded music: