We were tasked with creating a sound piece that would resemble a storm, and from there we would put all of our files into one folder and pick out other peoples creations and blend them together to create something entirely new.
Here is the piece I made, which was done on VCV rack, which is a free modular synthesiser plugin. I have recently been getting to grips with modular synthesis and I wanted to try and create this storm piece using something I don’t use too often. The intention was to creating a swirling, airy motion that felt like you were in the centre of a tornado, being at the mercy of the force of nature. I wanted the sound to feel epic and intense but with fragments of beauty lying in it, to appreciate the awe inspiring quality of a storm.
I had four oscillators running with two being triggered by a sequencer. One oscillator provided a smooth, constant bass tone for depth whilst another added a wall of buzzing high end. The two other oscillators being triggered by the sequencer created a wistful circular motion that sounds like an arpeggio being played underwater. It was important that all the sounds culminated to spark a dense overall sound as being in the middle of a tornado would be loud and abrasive. I thought of the piece as reflecting on being at the mercy of mother nature, both terrified and at peace knowing your fate is not in your hands. I used a texture synthesiser module to add more air and dimension to the piece. The module was triggered by the reverb of the main swirling sound and has a dreamlike subtlety that adds more muffled intricacy to the rest of the sounds and gives them more structure to be fluid around.
For the next part of the task I first took two compositions from my peers (Hywel and Max) and blended them together. The aim here, as Milo said, was ‘goalless exploration’ or in other words using the material to spark ideas and new ways of thinking rather than trying to solidify your idea before you even start producing sound. I like this way of looking at things because it is what I tend to do when I’m stuck for ideas; resampling things you have already made or using an existing loop and processing it until it is something else can often lead you down a path that would have otherwise not gone down.
For my mashup of two pieces of sound, I tried my best to retain the respective qualities of both pieces that had spoke to me in the first place, whilst at the same time creating something new. Max’s piece was a lot more atmospheric, with Hywel’s having more dynamism and timbral/textural shifts. I used frequency modulation, lowpass filtering and grain delay to blend the two together and used LFO’s to modulate and arrange the sounds into my own composition. I think it worked well because it has a uniqueness that makes it mine but it pays respect to what came before it.
My second piece was an evolution of two pieces that had already been blended together, so the next stage basically. My mindset was different with this because someone had already edited the original sounds, so I treated this how I would treat any sample and processed it quite heavily. I used EQ’s and chopped up the sample, turning one into a distant, delayed kick sound, with the other two being affected by LFO’s controlling the feedback of a resonator/flanger plugin as well as one LFO controlling the other ones rate to create randomness. Finally I put the whole sample through Ableton’s vector grain plugin which added even more randomness and soft glitches and pulsations. Put together the layers turned into a blissful soundscape that had an industrial edge to it.
To address the point of this exercise, my initial piece was specifically inspired by a storm, but building off of other peoples storm pieces began to lead me further and further away from the storm idea, and helped to form new ideas and sounds. This is a process that I thoroughly enjoyed and I had a great experience listening to how everyone approached the initial task differently. I would like to implement this process more in my own work.