Having completed all my composition sketches, I now have to begin work on my final project.
I have chosen to pursue the idea of using the train platform/signal box as my location, and to create an acousmatic composition with audience-interactive elements.
The main musical influences for the piece include acousmatic pieces such as Gobeil's Associations Libres and Barnard's binaural pieces Steam and Closely Observed Trains.
The music itself will be entirely made up of sounds I have recorded on the Worth Valley railway near Keighley.
The recording itself was an interesting experience. Taking an H4n Zoom recorder on a trip up and down the line, with a glove pulled over it to try and mitigate the wind was an... experience. As well as fighting with wind noise, there were also lots of excited children, train announcements and Christmas music piped over the station speakers to interfere with my recordings. A large amount of the footage sounds something like this.
However, from all the recordings, I was able to isolate a library of sounds including whistles, steam hissing, coupling and uncoupling train carriages, and the sounds of the locomotives arriving and leaving.
The plan is to arrange these, and in some cases process the sounds and add effects, creating a sound environment which is both familiar and alien - uncanny.
The audience will then be able to manipulate the piece from the signal box, either using a LEAPmotion device or a push controller (or similar). I haven't yet decided which controller to use. The LEAP is very instinctive to use and allows more freedom over controlling multiple parameters, as you can see in this performance as part of a different module last year, where I used a LEAP device to control a live electronic performance. However, using a controller to switch between tracks (which would be difficult to achieve with a LEAP device) is much more similar to the act of switching points to allow a train to switch lines. I believe the best way to make the decision will be to compose the piece and then choose whichever device best works with the finished product.
In addition, I will have three actors amongst the audience, with devices playing a recording of the interior of a train carriage. The original idea was for the actors to be wearing bone conduction speakers, so that they could hug audience members as if parting before catching a train, and allow the audience to hear a snatch of the soundscape as their heads touched. However, this idea proved unrealistic, and so instead the actors will be wearing headphones or earphones which they will offer to the audience. This will give audience a layered listening experience - allowing them to hear the interior of the train, the outside of it and the sounds of the museum all at the same time.
Foucalt talks about museums being heterotopias of time - pockets of space where time is flexible and in a state different to the outside world. I want to enhance this experience, creating a true heterotopia where aspects of a train journey can coexist simultaeneously in a sometimes confusing, but hopefully beautiful way.
I have chosen to pursue the idea of using the train platform/signal box as my location, and to create an acousmatic composition with audience-interactive elements.
The main musical influences for the piece include acousmatic pieces such as Gobeil's Associations Libres and Barnard's binaural pieces Steam and Closely Observed Trains.
The music itself will be entirely made up of sounds I have recorded on the Worth Valley railway near Keighley.
The recording itself was an interesting experience. Taking an H4n Zoom recorder on a trip up and down the line, with a glove pulled over it to try and mitigate the wind was an... experience. As well as fighting with wind noise, there were also lots of excited children, train announcements and Christmas music piped over the station speakers to interfere with my recordings. A large amount of the footage sounds something like this.
However, from all the recordings, I was able to isolate a library of sounds including whistles, steam hissing, coupling and uncoupling train carriages, and the sounds of the locomotives arriving and leaving.
The plan is to arrange these, and in some cases process the sounds and add effects, creating a sound environment which is both familiar and alien - uncanny.
The audience will then be able to manipulate the piece from the signal box, either using a LEAPmotion device or a push controller (or similar). I haven't yet decided which controller to use. The LEAP is very instinctive to use and allows more freedom over controlling multiple parameters, as you can see in this performance as part of a different module last year, where I used a LEAP device to control a live electronic performance. However, using a controller to switch between tracks (which would be difficult to achieve with a LEAP device) is much more similar to the act of switching points to allow a train to switch lines. I believe the best way to make the decision will be to compose the piece and then choose whichever device best works with the finished product.
In addition, I will have three actors amongst the audience, with devices playing a recording of the interior of a train carriage. The original idea was for the actors to be wearing bone conduction speakers, so that they could hug audience members as if parting before catching a train, and allow the audience to hear a snatch of the soundscape as their heads touched. However, this idea proved unrealistic, and so instead the actors will be wearing headphones or earphones which they will offer to the audience. This will give audience a layered listening experience - allowing them to hear the interior of the train, the outside of it and the sounds of the museum all at the same time.
Foucalt talks about museums being heterotopias of time - pockets of space where time is flexible and in a state different to the outside world. I want to enhance this experience, creating a true heterotopia where aspects of a train journey can coexist simultaeneously in a sometimes confusing, but hopefully beautiful way.
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