Project Overview:

For the purposes of this project I plan to create a piece of sound art to co-inside with a visual stimulant which invigorates and replicates the lives and atmosphere of the migrants living in Syria. My aims are to use abstrat forms of sound that will work hand in hand with the piece of media it’s composed and arranged alongside, providing a new form of narrative to engage the audience with, using both elements to create an atmosphere around them of all the middle easterns concepts such as its exotic, mysterious and fascinating values such as the lifestyle, religion and it’s cultural heiritage. But it also aims to uncover and present the other more brutal side of what we generally assosiate with Syria such as the ongoing fear of it’s inhabitants and the warfare and loss that shrouds and is publisiesed so frequently over the media.

 

Aims and Objectives:

The soundscape should consecutively meld between both sides which hold and evoke completly different emotions, idea’s, concepts and views and as a whole be a very transformative piece. For example when the audience watch/listen they should be able to picture themselves in the richer more classically cultural historic city of Demascus, and then in an instant change the scene to the middle of Bagdad.

Going more deeply into the orientalist culture within Syria, I plan to take elements from the contrasting views and forms of culture and incorpirate them within my soundscape. On the more traditionalist side, I want to incopriate and present it’s post-historical value’s such as the religion and the well known erotic belly dancing which to this day still acuratly portrays Arab feminine culture. Whilst on the contrasting side of Syria’s modern assosiation I will look at the fear factor linked and involved with the terrorist orginisations Al-Qaeda and Isis, and audibly present and evoke within the audience the sense of singularity, helplessness and insignificance, from being faced with the unknown and what is out of our understanding.

In short, my aim is to provide a transformative soundscape alongside a visual piece that will capture the felt emotions and collectivly pass these emotions onto the audience to put them in the possition of the people of Syria, how they live, how they feel and evoke their drive to survive.

 

How I Plan To Do It:

I plan to interperate these emotions through various synths and virtual instruments within Logic Pro (my DAW of choice) such instruments include: Alchemy, EFM 1, Kontact, Reactor, Zebra2 and the EXS24 sampler. The reason I’m choosing these certain plug in’s is not for the fact that I may use them very frequently in my work constructing other soundscapes or productions, but is for the fact that they manipulate and craft sound with ease, and each provide a different form of synthesis and sampling that I will tie in together and use to provide the different elements of the soundscape. For example the EFM1 is a frequency modulation synthesiser which in short is defined by one waveform being modulated by another within audio range at a different rate making the waveform more complex and providing a dark and gritty timbre, (this is what I’ll use for my darker atmospherics) whilst Alchemy diverses onto both additive and granular synthesis, where I can build and layer sounds and samples on top of one another to craft rich and tonal textures to ‘fill out’ and provide the main body of the soundscape itself.

Through my project I will be looking at the use of other native plug ins, some of which that have been brought to my attention such as Soundiron’s ‘Voice Of Gaia’ which provide strong tonal accents and voices by Francesca Genco and also ‘Arabic Strings’ by Arabic World Plugins which consits of a vast range of strings and percussive instruments that will help me achieve and formulate the theme of the soundscape.

Another plan of mine is to sample audio from some of the material I have been researching for this project such as doccumentarys, news reports about the wars in Syria, such as vocal lines seeping in and out in the background not as a prominent feature but more as an undertone to force the audience to try and concentrate and focus in on each little element within the audio.

 

Further Research and Development:

Over the coming weeks I plan to experiment with designing sounds, I will keep up to date posts with what I create, craft and post them on here alongside a description of how I made it, how I plan to incorpirate it into the soundscape, what emotions it’s inteded to evoke, and how it will help structure the piece as well.

I will be attending Frequency Festival next week to look and listen to a presentation by ‘Ear Films’ they describe their work as “Live storytelling using 3D ambisonic sound, a cinematic score, a multitude of speakers, a load of blindfolds, and your incredible imagination.” I will anylise their models and work and try extract elements and idea’s from that to incorpirate in my own soundscape to help me better structure my piece.

I will be delving deeper into my research of Middle Eastern culture to try and identify values and focuses on their cultural heritage which I can use and manipulate to provide and exert a greater understanding through my work towards the audience.

I will look at the works of Edward Seid and his academic writtings on the subject of Orielentalism and take inspiration from his arguments and findings and use it to help better structure my work to show a greater understanding of mid eastern culture.

Learning Outcomes:

Throughout the duration of my project I plan to learn devlop my skills in.

– How to creativly produce an abstract work of art to co-inside with visual media

– How to modulate and manipulate sound and make it more transformative

– How to alternate between forms of signified forces and affective forces and if so how I can link the two together in both a visual          and audible context

– How to tap into and develop an affective storyboard within sound