When planning how I was going to create the audio paper, I had to figure out what DAW I was going to edit, record, and mix on. I thought about using Logic Pro X and Pro Tools, but I have neither of those on personal computers and wouldn’t have the opportunity to experiment as much if I had to come into the university to edit, record and mix. Because I would only have so much time to use the computers. I landed on using Ableton, as I own it on my own computers, and it lets you freely experiment while doing that on logic or pro tools is more difficult as they are not built to experiment as freely as Ableton is.
With that chosen, the next thing was to lay out the track. I decided to start the track with a 15-second silence, and then the sounds start slowly creeping in over the piece. The way I composed this piece was as one big crescendo, having the sounds slowly work their way into the piece. Then finish with another 15-second silence, to realise how loud these sounds are. This use of silence was inspired by John Cage’s 4’33, which you can read more in-depth about my other blog here.
The way this piece is constructed is to start with the construction and roundabout noises, so the way I compiled them was to start with one noise that fades in, and then slowly fade in other construction and roundabout noise. I used minimal effects on these sounds, I used Valhalla supermassive as a reverb on some of the construction sounds to add a nice space to the sounds. But I didn’t use reverb on all the tracks, as it would become muddy, and take away from the rawness of these sounds that I wanted to capture. I used MISHBY which is a destroyed tape machine plug in on one of the construction noises that fades in and out pretty quickly. Overall the use of effects on this part of the track is kept to a minimum. I found this a challenge because I am someone who is constantly using and customising effects in my pieces but I felt it would be inappropriate in this context.
I talked about my use of the text to speech and what effects I used on it in another blog post which you can read here, so I will not be talking about that in this blog post.
After the noises of the construction and the Elephant and Castle roundabout, we start hearing the tube. I started bringing in the tube sounds while the construction noises were fading out, so the sound keeps on building up and there is a seamless transition from one sound to the other. I experimented with using a period of silence between the construction and tube noises, but I found the piece lost its momentum and feels like it was being restarted, which is not what I wanted.
The sound of the tube uses more effects to help with the crescendo of the track and to also affect some of the sounds in the raw audio. For example, you can hear people speaking and rustling coats and food packets. I wanted to use effects to be able to still hear this somewhat but have it hard to tell what they’re speaking about or what the sound of rustling is. I used a mixture of transposition, reverb, and MISHBY to detune the sounds slightly near the end of the piece. Here is the sound of a raw recording of the tube captured on my phone, and here is that recording after being run through MISHBY, Reverb and being transposed down
When it came to ending the track it was hard to avoid it being somewhat abrupt. Especially when you’re dealing with a noisy ending that is supposed to stop quickly. I feel that it is always going to be abrupt when dealing with that. The best way to make it feel abrupt but in a good context is to make sure the sound at the end has been playing for a bit so it feels like it should end, and not just have the sound play once or twice and then stop it. Having the sound repeat and build in volume and distortion makes the abrupt ending feel satisfying. The piece ends with another 15-second silence, to be used as a reflection of how noise pollution could be affecting you. Below is a link to the most recent version of my audio paper, we have a class crit soon so I expect there will be some feedback that I can work on.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VujX_7ISf7xq165ZyaeGdyYV6f73qezP/view?usp=share_link