Author: Daniel Marin Morejon

After doing the necessary research and having written a script, I was ready to start with the Audio Paper sound production. There are three essential elements in this work, my own voice, music and sound effects.

Voice

Recording voice is a difficult task that involves a whole science behind it, and doing it at a professional level is something that normally takes years to train and specific equipment in order to be recorded; therefore I’d separate this task into two sections, my own voice, and the recording equipment.

Reading or talking to the microphone requires concentration, intonation and rhythm, and in my case focus on improving the pronunciation as much as possible in order to be understandable. I’ve been checking basic techniques for speech recording, like the posture to adopt, the distance to the microphone and the space to use. I have also adapted the text to make it as easy to read as possible and used a teleprompter in the computer to read the text as I record.

As recording equipment, I have used a condenser microphone, the Marantz MPM-1000, which is a very good diaphragm microphone for voice recording, with a frequency response of 20-20000 Hz and Cardioid polar pattern. The microphone is connected and Phantom powered with the audio interface Komplete Audio 6 by Native Instruments and the microphone is set in a desk mic stand in front of me. I will be recording the voice in Pro Tools and I will also add some digital plugins to the voice channel, with EQ, De Esser, Expander and Compression.

Music and Sound Effects

Some music and sound effects will be added to the main speech body, although it’s not the main focus of the Audio Paper, some music and sound fx will inform the listener more in depth about the topic, more importantly, taking into account that it is a sonic subject.

I have mainly used music from the artists that I talk about, being used as a background for the time I’m talking of each one of the prophets, and also other styles like medieval and ragtime music to make the listener travel to the time when these artists lived. I just composed a little ambience with my modular synthesiser that is used as an intro at the very beginning, I thought that it was more interesting to curate a soundtrack with different artists rather than compose my own music which was not the main goal of this assignment.

There are not many sound effects, but I have used some field recordings alongside the piece to add a bit more of atmosphere, and to vary from the musical pieces, adding some space to reflect. Once all the elements are arranged in the project, I will do some mastering work, adding EQ, compression and limiter to the Master Channel in order to get better volume and dynamics.

Understanding Audio Papers

For the assignment in this unit Sound Studies and Aural Cultures, we have been requested to develop an Audio Paper. This format is an innovative practice within the academic world, and it approaches the essay field, but from a distinctive and more creative perspective, allowing us to work with sound as a material, and take advantage of it’s nuances through voice, music and sound design among other uses.

The audio paper brings a wide variety of possibilities as a format, in order to explore a topic. As we have seen on the Audio Paper Manifesto by Sanne Krogh Groth and Kristine Samson, an audio paper makes a difference with the written formats into some different aspects, for instance, the audio paper approaches the performative aesthetics, becoming an experimental way of supporting academic arguments; the audio paper is idiosyncratic, and is allows to have multiple protagonists to name a few of these features.

Choosing my topic

Now I have to find a topic for my audio paper, and this will be Prophecies in Sound or people who have predicted events that would happen in the future, in the world of sound and music technologies. The main argument that brought me into this path of research is the concept of the Sound-houses, written by Francis Bacon back in the 17th century. In this passage of an old novel, Bacon describe with an awesome detail some practices relating music and sound, like the use of electronic intruments and effects sound processing. I read these writings for first time on the book “The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music” on an essay included in the book by Andrew Hugill called “The Origins of Electronic Music”.

The second piece of writing that put me in this line of research were some writings from Edgard Varese, where he explains his visions in the world of music and sound, and he makes some accurate predictions that could resemble with precision with laptop musicians, digital recording or the use of MIDI to reproduce music. I read this fragments in the book Audio Culture by Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (An awesome book that I borrowed from LCC’s library), and after some further research, I found that Varese was also famous for his prophecies in electronic music, so I thought that it would be great to investigate a little bit more to find more similar cases, and this assignement and the audio paper was a perfect opportunity to do it.

Research

I started then to do my research about other visionaries in the world of sound and music and I quickly found that there were many of these cases, not only in the field of music technology but there are many cases in which lyrics from songs have predicted the future in different ways, and of course people who were advanced to their time and predicted changes on the technology. I really didn’t want to focus on other prophecies apart from the related with the sound devices of the future, but I have to say that I’ve found very interesting informations, and is worth to investigate about these predictions that in some cases used music to advance what would happen in politics, history or in the life of the musicians themselves.

To research the topic I used various routes, but mainly reading books that I had at home or I borrowed from the library; and also online, with the use of the browsing engines, and Google Scholars, having found very interesting material, like an e-book version of “Sylva Sylvarum”, a very old book from the 17th Century from Francis Bacon, where he speaks about fascinating experiments in acoustics. I also spend some hours in the library, using the UAL Library Catalogue, finding a couple of books about Varese and other about general sound and music history.

This research ended with 5 interesting artist to study, all of them having predicted changes in the future of music industry, and these 5 subject would compose the main body of my Audio Paper. These writers and musicians will appear in chonological order in the work, and they are: Francis Bacon, Edward Bellamy, Edgard Varese, John Philip Sousa and Jim Morrison. The audio piece will also have an intro and conclusion section and will be accompanied by music from these artists, some own compositions and sound effects.

During the end of summer and the first moth of this second year of university, I have been doing a personal research video on Contact Microphones. Knowing that we would be developing an audio paper on the first term, I thought that it would be interesting to start experimenting with my own voice recording, and the exercise was quite helpful. For the script I was researching about the history of the contact and piezo microphones, and I also re-visited Sonic Doing & Thinking course from Year 1, where we were studying about this kind of microphone. The video explains the history of piezo technology, how it works and the main artists who use it. It was uploaded to Youtube on my personal channel, under my alias “Dasero”, my parallel project about experimental sound, synthesisers and electronic music.

The Sounding History podcasts talk about the history of Sound and Music in the last 500 hundred years. These podcasts are hosted by Tom Irvine and Chris Smith, two music historians interested in reflecting the history of sounds not through the main music composers, but from a different point of view, the people who live those times.

We have been told in class, to listen to one episode per group and expose the main ideas and our opinion in class, the episode that my group was assigned was number 4: “Sounding Stone & Cetacean Energy”.

https://www.soundinghistorypodcast.com/episodes/episode-4

This podcast talks about colonial ages in the silk route in China, and how explorers experienced the sound and language of the area, having found great discoveries, like a stone inscribed in the Chinese and Syriac languages, which represented a revolution on the understanding of how the Chinese language was created and it’s “musical” origin.

In the second part, the podcast changes the subject to explain about the sonic environment of whaling ships in the colonial era. These ships used the navigate outside its territory for years, and the crew discovered and lived at different location in the world finding different languages and types of music.

re(Search) Try to find recordings of your local dialect. What makes it distinctive? Are there special words?

I would say that one of the my local dialects is the Valencian language, as I was born in the Valencian Comunity in Spain. This language is also found in Catalonia, the Balearic Islands, the Province of Alghero in Italy and other small regions in Spain. This podcast, created by L’ETNO (Valencian Museum of Ethnology) talks about the fears of the Valencian people – A que tenim por els Valencians y Valencianes? (What are Valencian people afraid of?). This dialect is distinctive for being a romance language featuring similarities with French and Italian. As a difference with Spanish, this language make use of apostrophes and hyphens on its writing, caracteristics that we cannot find in the Castilian language. The podcast talks about the feelings, psychology and meaning of the word fear; “Por” in Valencian, “Miedo” in Spanish.