For my new project I’ve decided to work on for the specialisation element I’ve been tasked by my friend Rob, a fashion history student to create the sound to his theoretical fashion exhibition. It will be a retrospective on the brand Final Home, using it to create/add to a discourse around fashion and homelessness in the UK.
His plan is to incorporate an LED screen like how it is used in the Mandalorian. The video below shows how it can be used to project other planets in a realistic and immersive way.
As shown above I am working with a circular shaped room so the best speaker layout that comes to mind is 7.1. Having 8 monitors spaced evenly around the room will allow for certain sounds projected on the LED screen to be brought in and out in conjunction with what is presented on screen. Rob has also told me there is a dystopian element to the cityscapes he is having made, hinting that maybe having a darker tone to the audio I will produce will be more fitting, as opposed to the ‘tranquil and serene’ atmosphere Rob suggests above. To mix the urban and dystopian themes together I will incorporate a mix of electronically synthesised sounds, specifically with my modular case and also cheap digital keyboards I have bought from flea markets. I think using second hand equipment ties in with the theme set out by Rob. dystopian worlds are often caused by human overconsumption, and mixing in sounds produced by obsolete equipment hints at a world where technologies have been lost and rediscovered. For instance like in the Mortal Engines series of books I read as a child. A dystopian steampunk world is created post massive nuclear world war where the human race is rediscovering old technology and relearning what it might be and what it could be used for. Using obsolete technology in this way with the dystopian cityscapes being projected on screen will denote and further emphasise this dystopian theme.
I will also be using field recordings of commonly found urban sounds. Footsteps, traffic sounds and the like will be processed through buffers and granulator synthesis to symbolise the urban atmosphere in a post apocalyptic way. Taking field recordings and chopping them up into glitchy little pieces will create this sensation. I think I will heavily process a lot of my sounds, using granular synthesis to create a floor of feedback soundscapes with which to allow the glitching field recordings to dance over the top of.