One of the projects I discovered whilst researching into my project was the work of Daniel Kordik entitled ‘[Sy][ria]’ where he collected a range of field recordings from locations all across Syria made in April and May of 2011. The piece itself is a mix of composed orchestrated sampled sounds.

you can listen to the piece here: http://zvukolom.bandcamp.com/album/sy-ria?from=embed

 

In the beginning of the piece he uses a lot of dissonant tones and sound to set the feel of tension, then cuts to a man singing on a megaphone in what sounds like a street, with the sounds of cars, traffic and people faintly in the background. It really brings alive the personality of the streets of Syria and captures the essence of what we may perceive as modern life for Syrians. The next scene cuts out into what I can tell is a religious protestor or activist, praising his god among the people, the work he did with the wind interference I found particularly intriguing, the way he added reverb onto it and used it to transition in the next part I thought was ingenious, and I will take this aspect into using delays and reverbs to help me transition my own piece.

 

Daniel states that the concept of his work was to provide a “haunting memento to what eventually happened in Syria. A country ravaged by unrest and political upheaval. This sense of tension and disembodied anticipation and sounds, is translated onto Kordík’s record, some parts of the first track sounding as if they could be Pharmakon’s intro.”

The basic uses of just one portable microphone, so what he has to work with in contrast to how I plan to construct my soundscape is quite different as I want to re-create Syrian culture as I perceive it through the use of instrumentation and sampling.

 

The piece itself is only around eight minutes long, but captures the middle eastern elements so creatively within that shortish timeframe.

I wan’t to take elements of this soundscape and idea’s such as the use of the chanting of Syrian locals and activists, I believe it adds a lot of textural quality to the soundscape and really enhances it’s depth!

 

Orientalism generally refers to the middle eastern, asian and northern african societies and in commonly used as a term of patronisation towards Mid Eastern culture within academic writings.

in it’s relation to music, it is often referred to within more exotic styles of music, for this element I really want to use composition to bring out elements of ambience and use textures to emphasise these said exotic elements within the soundscape.

 

Edward Said wrote a book on Orientalism, entitled ‘Orientalism’ which is a book in which Said has challenged the concept of Orientalism, or the difference between the East and the West. The study of Orientalism comes from colonials of the European nation moving to the lesser developed countries of the East, they found their culture very exotic and therefore began the study of Orientalism, or the study of people from an exotic civilisation.

 

So I need to focus on this key term ‘Exotic’ and how I’m going to best translate that through composure, which leads me onto my next key topics of study. The approaches of Formalism and Naturalism.

 

Two approaches that I will be focusing on throughout this soundscape are the Naturalist and Formalist approaches to soundscaping.

The Naturalist approach is more composure based with the use of authentic instrumentation and literal sounds, such as a string ensemble, a vocal choir. An easy way of remembering it is to think of it of a natural source of sound, un-edited and un-tampered with.

The Formalist approach as you can probably gather is the complete opposite side of the spectrum, where sounds are constructed, adapted and well formulated.

No soundscape can be either purely naturalist or formalist, it rests on a percentage of either side, some being more Naturalist, whist others being more formalist. I plan to balance my soundscape somewhere in the middle as I find both elements to play key roles within the sonic environment. Using formalist techniques to build tension at atmosphere’s, such techniques as using tonal dissonance’s to create a so called imbalance causing the listener to feel uneasy as such. But using naturalist forms to really bring out the vibrant heritage of the middle eastern’s exotic culture, and generally set the scene for my soundscape!

From the work I have listened to already such as Cristianna’s abstract works, she takes a very strong formalist approach when it comes to sound in her work. It’s all generated and manipulated to resemble the on-screen footage. Whilst looking back at Daniel Kordiks work, I would say it’s verging on the very Naturalist point of view, where everything is recorded in one medium and it’s all the one natural sound recorded on location, and it’s only editorial process is the use of effects to transition the pieces together. So these two pieces of work gives me a very wide perspective of what the different approaches are, and how I can define my own work through this.

 

I’ve been looking at some BBC documentaries regarding the war in Syria to help grasp a better understanding of how I can replicate the terror and fear of the radicalisation that is withheld within this society. One of the interviews as follows Syrian President Bashar al-Assad speaks to the BBC about the security and stability of his country.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-31327153

I want to sample and edit this interview into my soundscape and re order the questions into something that may give my soundscape a bit more direction for the listener and helps it become more story driven.

I also looked at a few more articles to help me better understand what the term ‘Islamic State’ stood for: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-29052144

And to follow up that, I looked at a couple of articles to better understand the war on Syria, all down to US militants air-striking IS for their Chemical attacks upon Damascus.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-23876085

There’s not too much research on this matter, as I only wanted it as a basis to better understand Syria’s conflict.

The screening of the Ear films project ‘to sleep to dream’ was based on a narrative by the main character Jack, living a standard working life in 2056 where the world has all but mostly been wiped out, androids, AI’s and robots control daily life and culture, telling you what to do, how to live your life, restricting your relations to other in danger of being ‘sanctioned’. The model of culture basis’s itself of a dystopian capitalist society where workers are graded on the amount of credits they have earned to define where they sit in society and how comfortable their life is. If you gain enough credits you were awarded an ‘upgrade’ where you got to jump to a higher rank in society, have an increased job, upgraded salary and be told that your life is sustainable and worth while.

 

Jack, our main character is a substandard worker, living a general sustainable life, everything in his life is the same, the same routine, he’s told to get up, he’s told how long to shower, he’s told when he has to leave and get his train by what I imagine to be a floating AI robot with a camera constantly watching. But he starts to overwork himself and starts to dream through the daytime, causing him to see images, which slowly lead to him connecting back to two women claiming to know him from a child, and called him a dreamer, someone who could jump into their dreams delving deeper and deeper until they reached ‘the realm’ a subconscious reality within a dream where everything is real but “the rules are different”. The story follow Jack journey to finding the realm and the image he keeps seeing in his dreams, to unlock the strain on culture in modern society and for everyone to see what he can see.

 

I loved the interpretation of the film, as I believe everyone will have interpreted it differently, afterwards we had a q&a session where we described how we saw the characters and pictured the environment around us, some members of the audience linked the experience to well known films such as inception and the fifth element, where as I found myself seeing a much more apocalyptic environment from a best selling game franchise “Fallout” and also scenes from “The Matrix”.

 

The development of the story was incredibly intense as well as I felt extremely indulged and immersed in the atmosphere, sometimes picturing myself as Jack himself, and other times seeing him walk through the scenery as narrated by the EarFilms team, this gave the overall experience a more lucid feel as nothing really stayed the same and was forever shifting in this almost hazy reality.

 

I spoke to the sound engineer at the end of the screening I spoke to the sound engineer, and asked him questions on how he constructed the soundscape and made this sense of reality through sound. He said that they’d had an extra team of sound technicians in Ireland helping them construct the sound, and that the total amount of sounds used was around 6000 – 8000 in total which is insane, these were recorded processed and melded over three years of work. He showed me how he mixes all the sound live in the session, 8000 sounds compressed into 19 audio tracks each being routed to a separate speaker that surrounds the crowd, in a spherical dome like feature.

I asked about his relationship with composure and found sound in the composition, he said that the score was generally used as a sonic stimulant to set and bring out the emotion of the scene that Jack’s feeling, but other than that the score couldn’t bleed in that much as it would take emphasis off the sounds modulating and surrounding us the audience.

He said it was important to not have more than three sounds moving around the scenery at any one time as it become quite intensive on our brains and ears to focus and track what’s going on around us without getting lost. This obviously made creating an atmosphere even more challenging being limited to only so much you can do at any one given time without loosing your audience.

 

I found this whole experience very enlightening, and throughout the whole film found myself in a very lucid state, where I felt I was dreaming, using the concept of excluding our eyesight to heighten our other senses, which in turn made the whole experience very transformative, which of course is what I want to achieve whilst of course incorporating visuals. Maybe with further development and integration into mediums such as ‘Google Glass’ and/or ‘Oculus Rift’ where you can put yourself in a virtual reality. It’s a stretch for this project, but with more time I think it could be quite a ambitious and attainable prospect!