For my sound piece I decided to talk about a certain dream I would have as a child, not quite a nightmare but unsettling nonetheless. I tried to use my skills in production and sound design to illustrate the feeling and vibe of my dream rather than putting the emphasis on my speech and on what I was saying. I used synth VSTs such as Serum, Hive and Xpand!2 throughout the piece, often using Valhalla Supermassive or EchoBoy by SoundToys in order to add interesting delays and effects to the sounds. I composed the melodies in the piece using my laptop keyboard and clicking the notes into the MIDI piano roll.
The loud thumping sound at the beginning comes from a field recording I made near the Thames River, next to the Hayward Gallery, where a construction worker was dropping a heavy object from 10-20 meters above. I used this in my piece because when I was a kid, I would hear this sound in my dreams, and I even had a phase of my childhood where I would hear it in my head during the day. I would just be playing with my toys or something and this loud, thundering sound would fill up my head slowly getting louder and more and more impactful. I still get hints of it sometimes, and I can remember what it felt like.
It doesn’t feel like this piece is quite finished, I think it needs cleaning up and needs to be stripped more to its core elements, but every time I attempted to do so I felt like I was just adding more instead.
The script felt like it ended up coming out a bit abstract, without any real tangible moments in the dream, like it’s all just a blur of events. But to be fair, that’s how dreams are. Many things in dreams do not seem to make sense and things that happen one after another can seem like they have no correlation whatsoever.
I don’t usually use my voice in my work so it was definitely a new experience for me to do this. It felt pretty uncomfortable because naturally I just don’t like the sound of my own voice, like most people. Once I read out the script and got all the lines right, I was relieved to have gotten that part over with! I had initially added effects to my voice to the point where it was nearly unrecognizable, but I felt I didn’t want to go down that route. Pitching my voice down the way I did simply seemed too cliché, reminding me of those interviews with criminals where they pitch their voices down to stay anonymous.
Originally my sound piece included an ending with drums, but upon further reflection I decided not to include it because certain sounds were taken from sample libraries. If you would like to hear that version, I have included a link at the bottom of this post. I think it’s good to mix the theme of sound arts with the type of art that I usually make, which is what I did here, but I ultimately decided that it was a bit too much.
My favorite part of the piece was probably the “screeching lasers”. I found a custom preset in Serum and decided to tweak it until I got what I wanted. I changed the wave forms and then also changed the effects in the Serum FX tab. Once I had my sound preset, I added Valhalla Supermassive – one of my favorite effect plugins at the moment. There are so many possibilities – so many cool things you can do, and the plugin is free as well. Basically it creates huge, swelling reverbs and delays. I ended up going with a reversed delay effect which I am definitely very happy with. I think it fits perfectly in the piece.
Overall, I found this experience to be very fun and I definitely feel like I went out of my comfort zone and made something that I wouldn’t usually make. If I were to do the same exercise again in the future, I might try to make it so my vocals are more on time with the sounds, as well as having the script be more poetic and less like narration. I feel like I had no real conscious influences whilst making this piece. Obviously as a creative we will always have influences from what we’ve heard or seen throughout our lives, but with this piece there’s no one specific artist or work of art that I can point to and say that it inspired me to make this.
Link to my dream sound piece (with drums at the end)