Our Second project for assessment was a 3 minute soundscape using recordings that we had gathered in the field, or previously  collected in our sound libraries. 

I used a  blend of  both to convey the sound story I was sonically painting for the listener in my piece

"Night Swims Hotel".

It starts with the crashing waves as they break on the beach and the faint sound of crickets chirping to indicate the night time, as the character of my story proceeds under the cover of darkness to explore the hotel gardens, we hear the crunching underfoot of gravel and the sounds of the crickets growing a little louder as he steps out from his hotel room on the beachfront.  He keeps walking further away from the beach into the woods of the garden, when he begins to hear ghostly echoes of song through the trees just as the rain storm and thunder begin which add an element of surprise and adventure as he hides under the trees and makes his way into the deeper into the forest to follow and see where the distorted hints of live music and club music are coming from. 

The character is in unfamiliar territory and is not sure what he is hearing or where he is blindly following it to.

I wanted the garbled eery vocal floating through the forest and  piano to have weird abstract feels, to borrow from Twin Peaks elements of multi-dimensions and sirens luring people into the woods. Unlike Twin Peaks this did not lead him into a portal to hell! Would have to work quite a bit more on this to pull that off lol!

Following on, he finds the hotel's live entertainment and nightclub area, skirts around this area peeping through the windows at the musicians who are practicing and preparing for the show ahead.

The duet being sung in the club is my vocal that I recorded, it's a test sample for a house track that I'm working on, trying out suitable vocals.

Using multiple EQ's, plug ins to add reverb, echo, bit crunch, distortion amongst other effects, I used vocal trf to transform my vocal into a male voice and have is spliced alongside mine to sound as though I was duetting with a male singer. 

The nightclub section is just warming up with the loud beats which he assess in passing is not for him, so he opts to walk away and return to the empty beach to partake in a night swim.  The soundscape is literally a scene as it is described, symbolically it is a person exploring and finding their way, musically perhaps or in a broader sense in life, finding preferences. Disregarding the mainstream and following a more intuitive, organic path off of the beaten track.

Some of the challenges I faced whilst creating my CW2 Soundscape included not being sure how to convert recordings I had made from playing my microkorg. 

I was successfully able to play and record, I then went about pitch flexing it which was fine and time stretching it to add melodic abstract  tonal warmth. I did this somewhat successfully in an attempt to usher the listener into the new scene as the character walks closer seeking to find the music being played in the distance of the night.

When it came time to automate however, I wasn't able to efficiently manipulate the volume of those individual tracks that I had recorded with the korg. 

This was rather disappointing as I'd put quite a bit of time into tweaking and deforming the melody lines to create eery effects. I had flexed one of my improvised korg tracks to sound like cracking lightening. When is came time to do my automation, the korg tracks were ridiculously loud! They wouldn't sync up with my automation controls so I couldn't use them as they totally overwhelmed the rest of the subtleties I wanted highlighted in the whole soundscape. 

This soundscape needs a lot more work to be up to a standard that I will be fully happy with. I was limited by technical difficulties however.

So I will take the time during our holidays to seek the solutions out. I shall go through all of our notes and online tutorials, Logic X books we have to gathered to refresh the information in my mind, as we covered so very much this last semester, another review will be essential. I will work on polishing this soundscape up so am calling it a work in progress for now.