Going into this projects I initially expressed interest in wanting to do something more down the route of music production but when it came to drafting up ideas for the sound piece, I wanted to try and make something that I was really interested in but at the same time was going really far out of my comfort zone

One thing that has always been an interest of mine in relation to sound is being able to invoke horror in the listener.

In this project, I intend to gather various elements that on their own seem totally normal but in the context of the piece I am going to create will hopefully have a really unsettling feeling and aura around the whole piece.

My basic plan is to use a selection of field recordings every day object sounds, samples and original compositions to achieve this.

One of my main inspirations going into this project is the genre of analog horror, within this genre they tend to lean more on using textual and atmospheric sounds to create tension and fear rather than loud jumpy sounds

CREATIVE SOUND PROJECTS BLOG 2: INITIAL RESEARCH

Going into this project I am wanting to draw some inspiration from analog horror. Wikipedia defines analog horror as “Analog horror is commonly characterized by low-fidelity graphics, cryptic messages, and visual styles reminiscent of late 20th-century television and analog recordings. This is done to match the setting, as analog horror works are typically set between the 1960s and 1990s.” (2023)

My love and interest in this type of media has long proceeded my interest in sound art so I thought a project like this would be a perfect opportunity to explore this sort of sound

CREATIVE SOUND PROJECTS BLOG 3: COLLECTING ASSETS AND EXPERIMENTATION

to achieve an aura like this I wanted to attempt to use some really unorthodox methods and plugins. during my research I came across a company called “Freakshow industries”

Freakshow industries essentially offers a selection of plugins to totally destroy, distort and manipulate your audio in ways i have never seen with other plugins available on the market

BACKMASK

Backmask is a plugin that instead of reversing the whole piece of audio, it reverses specific segments of the audio based on the certain parameters that you choose to set within the plugin. The only issue i have found with their plugins is that none of the functions actually tell you what they do so a lot of the process while working with them is a lot of trial and error

pocket dimension

Pocket Dimension is a granular effect that freezes, replays and manipulates incoming grains of sound to create complex textures from incoming source audio. (music radar, 24 Oct 2022)

dumpster fire

When purchasing this plugin you are told to “apply it directly to the garbage”

The official list of features is as follows

• Rotate the pitches. Hear them spill to all the wrong places. Pretend to understand the method and outcome
• Set an unreasonable and arbitrary number of bands in the least helpful way possible
• Use Aether to generate unspeakable hellscapes with discrete control of amount, pitch spread and time spread
• Understand none of this, it doesn’t matter.
• Please stop reading.

CREATIVE SOUND PROJECTS BLOG 4: COLLECTING SAMPLES, IDEAS, INSPIRATIONS

As i said in an earlier post, my main inspirations for this project most of my project will be drawing inspiration and ideas from different analog horrors

local 58

ch/ss

eventide media centre

One thing every one of these videos rely on in terms of sound is the use of making things seem dated using effects like vinyl crackle and a layer of white noise is evident throughout. This really adds to the 80s feel that a lot of these videos are trying to achieve

other popular tropes in analog horror

• distorted/manipulated versions of well known jingles/anthems
• reversed sounds
• only playing white noise
• codes/cyphers (morse code, pigpen cyphers)

Main idea

I want to play of the idea of it being some sort of old media from the late 70s/80s so the idea that I want to run with is making the it sound like it is flicking between different radio stations

to really give it a radio-like feel I will experiment with manipulating audio and samples from various radio and news broadcasts layering that with field recordings and foley i have recorded personally

CREATIVE SOUND PROJECTS BLOG 5 : CREATION

For this project, i decided to do all of the composition inside fl studio.

The reason I chose Fl Studio is that I feel it offers me the most creative control within a DAW and my workflow in fl is much more streamlined as apposed to logic, Ableton or protools

draft 1

the first drafted / rough version of the project looked like this within the daw, this was made up of samples that I had manipulated and recordings that i had captured, in this there is manipulated breakbeats, foley recordings of gravel to make the white noise type effect, chopped melodies that have been stretched and manipulated and recordings from 80s tv shows and radio broadcasts that have been manipulated using a variety of plugins such as eq, reverb delay and some of the freakshow industries plugins

updates

In the updates, i added to this version were mainly more textural layers such as on note played on the trumpet time stretched across the whole piece to add another level of depth and texture that really brings it all together and fills a lot of the otherwise empty space in the stereo field

I also added a version of an 80s Soviet news intro that I manipulated and edit using delays and distortion

Automation was added to make it feel like it is getting more and more distorted and mangled as the piece goes on (the automation clip was made from dumpster fire on the master)

FINAL VERSION

The final version for me was just about adding elements that tied the whole thing together such as getting a coherent intro and adding elements to fill out the blank space

The two main ones that i added were two synthesised sounds i made using 3xosc and serum

Both of these sounds were sustained across the whole piece and had automation applied to fluctuate their characteristics

CREATIVE SOUND PROJECTS BLOG 6: MIXING, MASTERING AND EXPORTING

Once i had reached a point where i was happy with the piece i was really keen to not over do it and end up spoiling what i had.

When it came to mixing it was more a case of just making sure the levels were ok and less of adding effects and adding ear candy because I had been doing that throughout the composition process

After balancing my levels to make sure nothing was peaking or distorting, I went really light on the mastering, choosing to only use a limiter because i was trying to not alter any characteristics of what i had made