Assignment 2: Breathe

I call this piece "breathe".
The sounds I used to create this piece are:
the tiny clock from my bathroom
the strings of my ukulele above the knot
keyboard typing
Beyonce's performance at the grammy's (reversed)
book pages being flipped through
my violin strings (plucked by my playing hand)
the washing machine
and my yawn

When I picked out what sounds to record for this project I was keeping in mind that I wanted an airy feeling to the piece. I originally wanted to do a whole composition made of sounds made from wrongly playing any of my instruments. However there isn't a lot of wrong ways to play instruments that make an unusual sound, so I had a small selection of violin and ukulele noises to incorporate somehow. I recorded bits and pieces of the Grammys to use and Beyonce's singing was so beautiful, I wanted to include it. However, I reversed it so that is sounds less like singing and more like a moaning of some kind. I sort of "fanned" the noises from left to right so that the listener is surrounded in it's atmosphere when they listen to it through headphones.
During the working process, I gravitated towards sounds that were light and airy, but also repetitious. The sounds create a building and rising of noise until a "breath" of resolution.

Working sonically was a challenge. It's really easy, almost too easy, to make everything sound creepy and cryptic. I tried to stay away from that because I'm not good at creepy. In my head I still had to visualize what the sound should "look" like. Which is weird because you can't see anything. For me, the layers of sound were equated to layers in photoshop, and I worked well that way. I made my piece very quiet in nature on purpose, however I think I may have made it too quiet. It was hard to tell if every layer was being heard and was working well together.

The atmosphere of my piece is very open. I used a lot of echo and paulstretch effects to give certain sounds more depth. It's starts out soft and almost silent and then grows into a flash of sound. I reversed the twinkling sound at the end and added a few more layers of sound to make the ending louder. The piece gradually builds and then there's a brief moment where it all dies down. Beyonce's "moaning" through the TV is very poltergeist and very creepy, but I wanted that to be subtle and faint. It adds a mysterious vibe.
It feels like anxiety or thoughts building up, and then being blown away. The ticking you hear softly at the beginning and end, signifies time continuing even as the stress mounts. It doesn't have a dark vibe of stress, instead it more neutral. It carries the essence of being anxious with out totally freaking the listener out.

-Avery Violet