After my finishing my draft of my instructional score I revisited it to see what could be fixed. In my blog where I talk about the first draft I talk about my use of spoken word and poetry, this is still very much the case but in my final script, I included more facts and tried to write it in a poetic way. What I did not like about my original script is that it came across a bit needlessly edgy and less informative about what noise pollution actually is. It came across like I was fear-mongering which is not want I wanted, I still want my piece to be a bit scary as it is a scary subject. As you can see above the eeriness is still intact but padded out with more tasteful facts and information.
I decided during the process of making the audio paper to use text-to-speech for the voice. I came up with this idea by thinking of sampling information videos about noise pollution as the speech but thought while writing the script I could have more creative freedom with what was said in my own writing. The inspiration for using text-to-speech came from hearing informational videos where a very robotic voice is telling you this information. It feels like this technique is used to scare people and dehumanise the video by using a voice that is imitating what a human sounds like. I thought this piece could use text-to-speech to somewhat satirise the fearmongering tactics used by these types of corporations but also tell the facts at the same time. These types of informative videos use information that is extreme to catch your attention, so I thought it could be interesting to use that in the piece. For example, I talk about how illness caused by noise pollution could lead to your death if left untreated, it is true. But is hyperbole, this was inspired by the concept of satirising the fearmongering tactics of those types of videos.
For the effect of the voice, I will be using plug-in called MISHBY (which is an acronym for Maybe I Shouldn’t Have Built You). MISHBY is a destroyed tape machine that specialises in distortion, glitching, detuning and decoding. I don’t want to warp the voice too much but want to use this effect too much but subtly use it to distort the text to speech.
The use of text-to-speech altered the way my script was written, as while I was playing my original script through the text-to-speech, I realised lots of issues with the way the script was written. The way it was structured seemed too short and there was not enough information in the script. My original script was also inconsistent in how it was written, jumping back and forward between spoken word and fact. It felt too sudden and abrupt. All of this made me more aware of how I was going to edit my script and rewrite parts of it.
Here is what the text-to-speech sounded like with no effects, this is what is sounds like after being processed by MISHBY, and Valhalla Supermassive (Reverb).
I also wanted to talk in my script about noise and disability. I work as a carer for young adults with special needs when I am back home. Lots of the young adults I worked with had sensory issues, lots of them to do with sound. We had noise-cancelling headphones for situations where loud noises are present. Sudden exposition to loud noise for a lot of these young adults can make them frightened and can lead to dangerous situations with the young adult. This is something that I personally do not see being written about and want to see more inclusion when it comes to disabilities of all types.
The use of text-to-speech may seem as a cop-out to some, as I do not have to worry about recording my own voice. But that is very much not the case, I have an artistic reason to be using text-to-speech and have provided the context behind why I chose to use it.