Hudson Millar's video: Silent City

University of Waikato linear music assignment. Sound track created for a animated pencil drawing of a European City called the Silent City. Sound track was created using sound effects and MetaSynth. Research: Creation, to me is to try to orchestrate the universe to understand what surrounds us. Even if, to accomplish that, we use all sorts of stratagems which in the end prove incapable of staving off chaos. Confirming the meaning of the word "stratagem" I used the webster online dictionary. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/stratagem strat·a·gem a : an artifice or trick in war for deceiving and outwitting the enemy b : a cleverly contrived trick or scheme for gaining an end From this quote I listed the primary theme words as below: Orchestrate the Universe Stratagem Chaos City Sound Scape Plan: From this research I decided to make a musical contrast between order and chaos. For order I decided to use the diegetic sounds of the city. I saw these sounds to represent order because they were a universal language understandable by everyone. These sounds would also give depth to the animated pencil drawings, bringing the city alive and making it feel believable. Also being diegetic the source of these sounds would be visible on the screen, and so would belong to the image. In contrast I wanted to create a sense of chaos, a sound scape mixed together and in opposition with the diegetic sounds. These sounds would therefore need to be non-diegetic and to be distinct it was decided they would also be electronic. Process: The first step was to list all visual clues to the sounds and locate these sound effects on http://www.freesound.org. These sounds were loaded into Logic Pro 9 along with the video and matched, then bounced out to a stereo diegetic sound file. This sound track was then loaded into MetaSynth and through using the Image Filter a number of new distorted versions of the original sound track was made. Also other shorter sound distortions were made using only parts of this sound tract such as the bells. The purpose for using MetaSynth was to make electronic sounds that were in unity with the diegetic sound, but at the same time introduce distortion and tones. The new electronic sounds were loaded into the Logic Pro 9 project, (that already contained the diegetic sound and video) and then were synchronised and level adjusted. What was still missing was a sense of space. This was achieved through track animation acting on pan, volume and reverb. Pan was used to adjust for left and right sounds and volume and reverb were used to create a sense of depth. Volume was also used to create seamless transitions between the various sound effects. The final sound track was bounced and added to the video using Adobe Premiere. Final Result: The end result was more a sound scape than music. There was some thought of adding musical instruments, but it felt this would be too different and overpowering. There is a strong sense that the sound is diegetic and yet at the same time it comes across as non-diegetic, strange and alien. The sound could be described as "trippy' or 'weird', which was the intended outcome - a sound that would represent chaos in an ordered world.