Jack Centro

• Whether you have met your production goals so far?
• Overall I am relatively pleased with my own and teams production goals. I feel I have attempted things that put me out of my comfort zone, for instance we were concerned with the amount of voice acting needed at the start of the unit, and originally intended to use professional voice actors. Yet due to past experiences in acting and drama I thought I’d just give it a try and speed up the process. I’m very glad I did this because the recording process became quite an entertaining experience where me, Yusuf and James experimented with our voices to some extreme levels. These sessions in the foley room also helped bring the group together as a whole and we began to discuss roles and what each person wanted to get out of the unit, as well as learning more about each other. Yusuf and James are both extremely talented producers and sound artists and my skills in production do not really compare, therefore it made sense for each of them to focus more on the sound elements such as field recording and ambiences. I wished to score the opening theme and help overcome my own concerns about my production skills. Having only scored the opening theme I do wish I attempted to score a theme for the forest environment but I had to be considerate of others goals as well. As a whole I’m proud of the groups production, we have all contributed sounds and music that work well with the video game and I feel everyone stepped into the unknown.
• What aspects will you address in post-production?
• In terms of my contributions, I will try and add more ambience to the menu screen and push the music into the background. I feel the music is way too prominent and takes away from the 3D space the user occupies, thus making the environment appear relatively flat and lifeless.
• The mixing for the voices need to be more prominent, especially in the laboratory scenes where the Masters voice becomes lost in the sea of ambiences.
• Add Footsteps in the forest scenes so it grounds the user, without them the users looses the augmented contact with the surroundings. I will use the woodland footsteps I recorded in the foley room sessions we had at the start of the unit.
• What was useful from the Crit?
• Firstly listening to the mix on the genelec speakers gave me a much better idea as to how all the individual components sound. For example the sub bubble sound for the floating orbs in the menu or the selection of plants is extremely loud in comparison to the ambience. I think a change in sound will also be needed to signify a change plant/object. This goes for the voices as noted in the previous answer.
• The feedback from classmates was positive and has helped settle some of my fears in terms of the production and has given me the confidence to make necessary changes I feel are needed.
• The final segment of the video appears lifeless and rushed. I will need to add spaceship and destruction sounds to match the visuals.
• To replace the forest soundtrack by adding Yusuf’s new score, using his older score in the final segment to signify the change in mood and ending of the game.
• What has changed through problem solving?
• The biggest change would be from not using Unity to scoring a video. Initially we wished to explore unity and VR completely but due to poor time management in this department and a sheer lack of know how, we have had to adjust. I don’t see this as a negative because neither of us are video game designers and Unity can barely run on any of our laptops. Therefore scoring for a video gives us more time to focus on the quality of our sounds and music.

Keywords: Sense of place, spirit of place, geography, virtual reality, authenticity

A phenomenological exploration into ‘place and existence’ discloses three interlinked elements:

1. Physical Setting: Place, Buildings, Parks, Streets
2. Activities: What occurs within the physical settings, shopping, gardening, running
3. Meanings: The desired sense of being or belonging or identity. Meaning derives from the experience of living within a place.

Spirit of Place

The term derives form the Latin genius Loci. It was believed that all spaces were sacred and occupied by a pantheon of gods. Now a sense of place is more secular (in most cases) and relates to ones own identity or position within a given space.

A place with a distinct spirit or identity is attractive to us. For me I have strong emotional attachment to the countryside and more particularly woods. Even now living in the city I find myself attracted to the nearest woodland cemetery for ‘the spirit’ it holds. I recount memories of the woods, create stories within them and and explore the woodland world at a heightened state of imagination. I would also note the woods act as a physical and sonic barrier to the outside bustling city that distracts and sometimes overwhelms me. Moving away from my Wordsworth waffle, the architect Christopher Alexander (1979) found it extremely hard to pin down the ‘spirit’ or what defines the pleasurable spirit of a particular space.

Alexander chose to use the term; “The quality without a name” to characterise places that we recognise and accept as attractive. Interestingly this description brings to mind the saying “architecture is frozen music”, which, if we contrast to the original would read; “the quality without a face”. Maybe the missing ingredient Alexander failed to realise or hear was that sound is the crucial element in the attractive makeup of a place. I would strongly argue that this is, for thinking back to my own spirit of place, the woods restrict outside sound but also amplify the living world in my immediate periphery, such as muntjacs, birds, streams, rabbits. The living world of the woods is loud, quite, soft and harsh, it is freeing and frightening.

Sense of Place:is synaesthic, combing sight, hearing, smell, moment, touch, memory, imagination, anticipation.

A particular quote I liked; “We live in an age when feelings are in the foreground and reason is in the background”

Literature Reference

1. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (M.McLuhan)
2. Life Between Buildings (J.Gehl)

The graphic design and animation for this game is beautiful and to an extremely professional standard. I think this did worry me at first, but I eventually found myself becoming lost in the possibilities afforded by the scenery and gameplay. The colours are rich and vibrant and the textures make me think of Ps2 games I used to adore as a child such as Ratchet and Clank, Big Little Planet and World of Warcraft. Games such as these remained in my mind while composing the opening score and attributing sounds to objects.

From extensive thinking into mood and the affect sound has on us, as a DJ my primary concern with DJing, is that the songs I select to play blend almost seemingly together with the imminent surroundings of me and the listener. The sound should imitate as much as it creates. LaBelle and Storr have been points of influence for me recently, helping me move away from mindset of dancer(active, contact) /listener but instead to the gamer(active,non-contact)/listener, something that is totally alien to me. The above soundtrack has been designed for The Oin Forest loading screen, in which the gamer/listener is situated in-between the game world and the real. By taking the headset off they return to the real but if they continue, the world of the Oin Forest opens up to them.

Acknowledging this limbo state sonically, plays an important role in readying the player for the VR experience. Therefore I began to draw inspiration from a range of sources that exist within these in-between environments such as; Airports, Elevators, Museums. These forms of mood music or muzak are often characterised by their airy and light tones that drift in the background. Therefore I decided to explore synths with lots of delay and reverb and muffled piano keys, a common place to begin for ambient music. Being a video game, I also had to bear in mind that the music had to be inviting, rather than experimental for the sake of ‘showing off’, which might hinder the gamers beginning experience where they adjust to the VR headset. Taking note from my own experience with VR, I initially felt quite claustrophobic and concerned due to the entire covering of my eyes and ears. If the music was harsh and unsettling, bass heavy and sinister; for one, the Masters laboratory theme would be undermined and two it simply wouldn’t match the menu environment.

NOTES

Leslie’s work has an exploratory nature, it is very transformative and explores the possibilities with modern technology. Currently working towards her Phd, Deere has begun to expand upon her debut live performance piece titled ‘Modern Conjuring for Amateurs’, she has evolved this into a VR Meditation experience.

Asking, can altered states be achieved through VR?

Array Infinitive: VR Gestural Audio-Visual Performance———Reminds me of a continuation or response to Pamela Z’s gestural works. Except Deere has opted to use VR as a visual enhancement and interestingly detach herself from the performance (the meditators cannot see her).

Array Infinitive requires actions to activate the sounds. Filters and reverb are positioned on the X and Y axis. Interestingly for Deere, the more she improvises with the equipment the more she unlocks–new combinations of sound and patterns emerge from the sheer range of gesture and movement. In her meditation groups she situates herself and the group within one combined VR experience. To note, Deere opted from an electroacoustic setup rather than headphone listening in order to create the sense of a unified experience, the same way one might attend a rave or live gig. (From watching the video the visual aspect seems very vapourwave, psychedelic and anamorphic shapes/colours dance and drift with the ambient sounds).

SPACE—-SOUND—-MOVEMENT—-COLOUR

She developed the piece in Unity, sending data from Max MSP on Ableton.

Her inspiration for this piece stems from:

• Meditation
• Group Meditation
• Colour
• Colour Theory
• Chakra Systems
• Altered States
• Sound Installations

Leslie was assisted by the Glasgow School of Art Choir tp create the ambient/chorus elements.

Journey

Deere’s introduction into sound began with dance, which for a dancer, positioned her within sound, responding to the vibrations through movement, expression and performance. She then moved into tap dancing which puts emphasis on the sounding of the dancer. It was during this period her interest in sound arts and performance arose. Deere states that dance and installation are very similar in the sense they both involve space and sculpture of the body.

Early Installations:

Amplified Time–Using gallery room acoustics and engagement as a tangible medium to replay sound.

Amplified Pair–A headphone piece that amplifies a conversation between two people participating. Encourages the listener to listen deep into the subtleties and nuances of each voice.

Amplified Water–Hydrophone in a water tank.

Interestingly these early works show a clear desire for Deere to uncover hidden sounds, patterns or identities within a given space or person. With her more recent endeavours she now uses her body; concerning gait, rhythm, speed and agility to unlock the hidden sounds along the invisible X and Y axis of her VR experience. Not only in form but in reference, Deere researched heavily into underground topics set within the 1890-1920 timeframe. Her interests lied in spiritualism, feminism, technological advancements and occultist magic/ritual. The melting pot of influences and past experimentation led her to her first live performance; “Modern Conjuring for Amateurs”.

GESTURE—-SOUND—-VIRTUAL REALITY

Literature References:

Thankfully unlike many practitioners who name drop artists and other points of reference way too quickly, as if we should know who they are always talking about, Deere gave a list of resources which I feel can be linked two both current modules.

1. Impression and Presence Within VR (Mark Grimshaw)
2. The Political Possibility of Sound (Salome Voeglin)
3. Performance Theory (Erika Fischer-Lichte)
4. Inner Sound: Altered States in music and media (Jonathan Weinel)

Artistic Reference:

1. Lighthouse (Catherine Yass-Filmmaker)
2. Ann Veronica Janssens (Experiments in light, sound, colour)
3. James Turrel (Installation-Emotional effects of luminosity, light as a tangible substance.
4. Hilma af Klint (Late 19th Century surrealist/mediumship–the channelling of knowledge into all her works)
5. Jef Cornelis (Rave Writer, Documentary maker)
6. William Basinski (Tape Loops)
7. Maryanne Amacher (The third ear and the feeling of sound. How space and positions alter experience)

Above is the powerpoint