For the finale of the soundscape, like the chapter on religion I wanted it to be fairly minimalist, I kept the piece to the fundamentals again. But used the key Elements from each chapter to formulate this.

 Picture 1Picture 2

I used the Gunfire from War to form a rhythmic pattern which i deliberately offset so the listener once again has to focus more closely on the piece itself. It also incorporates the sounds and sonic ambiences of Francesca yet again, with the two sides (War/Religion) playing alongside one another in harmony. This is meant to state the fact that throughout the exotic elements of the middle east and its culture, wherever there is religion and radicalisation. There will be war and chaos. These two elements go hand in hand.

There’s not really a lot to be said about the production of this chapter, the last bit of the contrast shows the use of most of the pads, textures and elements from war such as the heavy artillery which you can see in picture one above. and incorporated the chanting, and syrian strings from the beginning of the soundscape, taking all the critical key elements of what I’ve used to sonically reconstruct my adaptation of Middle Eastern culture and put them all together for one final ‘clash’.

To ease out of the soundscape I’ve used the recording of the winds, and Francesca’s soft vocal ambiences to gently ease out of the soundscape.

For this chapter of the soundscape  take a much more darker tone to the soundscape and think with a much more formalist approach.

through this chapter I create a lot of atmospheres and textures by using some of the sounds I have already got constructed and morphed them with the use of FX, filters and automation.

(Tuba Automation)

I used a lot of dark tonalities and low frequencies to really build upon the dark characteristics within the soundscape. Give it a very dissonant and disruptive tonality to it. Most of this automation was to do with filters such as this.

(Logics Auto Filter)

I automated the filter cut-off point so that I could bleed in the dark elements of the tuba how I wished, this also gave the soundscape more movement overall, and stops the rolling undertones becoming repetitive and somewhat dull.

My main element in this chapter though, is by far the Gunfire.

 (Gun Fire Audio)

To carefully represent and replicate gunfire, I couldn’t actually sample or record any actual gunfire, so I had to improvise a bit.

I used drum hits and FX from the sample Library ‘Damage’ by Heavyocity.

(Damage)

Through this plug in it offers a wide range of distorted hits, fx, loops and interchangeable samples which you can manipulate.

Through Damage I took a range of Kicks, high hats, Metal fx to create all my sound effects for the gunfire in the war chapter.

 

Creating Gunfire.

To create the Gunfire I took a range of kicks from damage’s library and bounced them down into audio to give me a raw waveform that would be easier to work with. Then I placed them individually across the timeline so that I could construct my own rhythm of gunfire. This took a long time.

 

To distinguish the two different types of gunfire I focused more on the narrative point of view. One I panned to the left side of the stereo field whilst the other I panned to the right, I also added filters onto them to give the perspective of the fighting being in the distance, yet I kept the left side of the gunfire to be the closer side as we normally associate the things with the left side of our brain as ‘good’.

I heavily filtered out the kicks on the right side to make them sound distanced and also added quite and intense reverb. The reverb I used was the Valhalla Vintage Verb, in my opinion one of the best reverbs available. I also used Logics Pitch Shifter on the left side of the gunfire, after experimentation I quickly learned that it heavily distinguished some of the lower tones really well, this was down to trial and error in sound design mostly.

 

It as a large rich tonal sound to it and is very easy to manipulate, unfortunately, for this project I also had to use the demo version due to my Mac being unavailable as in the middle of creating this chapter. The hard drive crashed and I had to borrow a Mac from my University to complete this project, which was really frustrating. The demo works almost the same as the full version but every 40 seconds it cuts out the wetness of the reverb for a moment.

 

After constructing and placing the gunfire I also used Hi Hats to simulate the sounds of speeding bullets. I took the hi hats and reversed them, then added some slight reverb to give them the ambience, panned them to their significant side and then placed one under each gun shot that it referred to. Once I had a hi hat under each gunshot for this section I highlighted them all and moved them a bar along so thats there’s a delay between the gunshot, then the speeding bullet.

 

For the left side, I layered these high hats with metal hits from damage, to add a more personal touch and to make the listener feel ‘closer’ to the action itself. I used different metal hits with slight changes in their tonality, because of course you don’t constantly hear something at the same pitch… These were also bounced from damage.

(Metal FX Hits)

 

The Explosions and heavy artillery were also processed and constructed in the same way, but they were EQ’d to have their low end boosted so that they had more power and prominence over the regular gunfire.

Also a key note that I picked up on, was that as I was using kicks to replicate gunfire, this clashed with my rhythmic kicks from the start of the soundscape, so for which I added a compressor and sidechined the gunfire to the rhythmic pattern so it’s still audible through the “Chaos”.

This chapter of the soundscape is where it starts to get a bit more complex and really focuses on the exotic elements.

In this section of the soundscape I drop out the recurring pads and instruments and focus purely with one external VST which is Soundirons Voice of Gaia: Francesca Genco.

 

This is an incredibly powerful vast, with a wide range of vocal textures throughout the entire pack!

You can listen to some samples of the sample pack here:

I did run into a few issues though whilst constructing this chapter. Unfortunately the vst requires the full version of Kontakt which I do not posses, so using it in Kontakt player it ran as a demo. So to fully utilise it’s elements I had to bounce down the mdid data into audio, which made it a bit harder to work with as I couldn’t really edit the length of the notes and such. I do prefer working with midi data and I think you can build upon it much easier, but it does take up a lot of cpu and memory when working with many external vsts running through Kontakt and Reaktor such as; Voices of Gaia, Prism and REV.

Here is a short overview of the layers and textures I used within this chapter. As you can see I used many different forms of vocal textures and layered them on top of one another to really provide a full rich exotic accompaniment. There are many different modes you can utilise, Legato mode, Franscapes, Vocal Textures, Staccato Mode, Phrases, Vocal Effects, Ambiences and Life. I think the trick to it was, was not overfilling it with sound.

I generally wanted to keep this chapter very minimalist sounding, elements I used such as these the prominent whispers in the background:  Where used as a sort of eire texture to pose as a sort of unknowing to the listener. They’re not quite audible, and they’re automated so that they pan from left to right but their intention is not meant to be strictly prominent. This takes the perspective back to making the listener focus.

The Plug in pack I decided to purchase to help the production of the piece, was a vocal sample pack from ‘Soundiron’

How it works is that Francesca was recorded in a studio singing a range of phrases, then after these are recorded they are edited and then digitised and installed into software designed to be able to have any composer reproduce Francesca’s performances into their work that they’re producing or live.

Within the software you can easily manipulate a range of properties with Francesca’s voice, some of these being: Pitch, Timbre, Phase, Direction, and Loudness.

The Plug in can be used through Native Instruments Kontakt, a sampler plugin allowing you to store multiple 3rd party plug ins all in one area, in short like a wide sound library with endless possibility. Unfortunately as I only have the Kontakt 5 player, using this plugin became quite the task. Every 15 minutes the ‘Demo’ would run out. To overcome this issue, everything I did through the plugin I bounced to audio with no processing. and then when the demo had run out I would close the plugin and restart it, quite clever I thought!

Bellow is what the early stages of the vocal textures sounds like, with also a picture so you can see what you’re hearing.