Composition Study 8 - Text to Sound

Introduction 

For this week's composition we were tasked with creating a piece of music using only the human voice as our sonic material. The rules of the composition were that we were unable to use any other sources of instrumentation and we were not allowed to sample anything, everything had to be a recorded. It could be either male or female.

Research

"Text-Sound Composition remains after more than forty years one of the highlights of Swedish electroacoustic music. The name denotes an artistic phenomenon which arose in the open environment of the 1960s at Fylkingen in Stockholm as an expression of interests in multi-disciplinary art at the nexus of text, music and technology." (Brunson) 

The piece would also have to be intelligible, meaning it would have to have contain content that could be understood. There are a number of different "language levels" that are contained within this style of composition which range from beneath the phonetic level to complex sound compositions. However for the purposes of this composition our brief 's are generally open ended, so we could use any language level we liked, here is an example of the table:

Composition

After failing to come up with a poem or something I could read myself, I decided to look at the broader term of the meaning of "text" and found that I wasn't specifically constricted to reading things myself. So I looked to one of the iconic scenes in Breaking Bad, with Walter White turning into Heisenberg. This is one of the most iconic scenes in the series with one of his famous quotes "I am the one who knocks".

To fit in with the criteria of the assignment, I decided to record the scene as it was being played through my speakers. The narrative I wanted to created was that Skyler was acting as Walter as the actual Walter White is turning into Heisenberg. To demonstrate a battle of Walters sub-conscious. The sounds that I used including using large amounts of reverb on the voices to make them sound cavernous, trying to demonstrate as if they were inside Walters brain. As Walter starts to talk towards the end his voice becomes more and more distorted, turning into Heisenberg, with the piece ending on the famous words "I am the one who knocks."

As discussed, everything used within the piece is from the vocals recorded. I used a program called Paul stretch in order to create the ambient sound in the background, I also made use of reverb, a ring modulator and octaver to manipulate the voices. Pitch-shifting on the voices between Skyler and Walter was also used, sometimes to give a more demonic effect.

Conclusion

This was an enjoyable piece to make and one of my favourites from the module. If the process was to be undertaken again I would have create more space between certain parts in order to build more tension. I would have also worked on certain aspects of the mix to make it sound more aesthetically pleasing. 

Final Mix

References

1. William Brunson. (n/a). Text - Sound Composition – The Second Generation. Available: http://www.ems-network.org/ems09/papers/brunson.pdf. Last accessed Sep 2014.