It’s Got Knitsonik On It

Tags

knitsonik, knitting, podcasts, sound art, sound design

I accidentally gave myself a bit of writers block last week, as I had two more posts I wanted to make about the Inverness Film Festival but wasn’t feeling at all inspired to write them. Therefore I couldn’t write anything else until I’d written them. Completely logical.

Yesterday, I finished catching up with a really interesting sound-related podcast, Knitsonik, so I decided to write about that instead – and hopefully kick the writer’s block to the curb while I’m at it.

Approximately a year ago, at a friend’s birthday party, I got into a discussion with someone about my twin passions of sound design and knitting. Now the relationship between these two things is completely clear to me, but is not something that is always obvious to other people. In fact, until that point the only person I knew who really shared these as twin, interweaved passions, was my former tutor from my masters course Gary Hayton and he’s now a Textile Artist who applies Fibonacci number sequences to knitted fabric. So to casually meet some in everyday life who not only didn’t think it was an odd combination of passions but did in fact tell me they knew someone who had done their PHD in that sort of thing and that they had a podcast about the subject. The idea that there were enough people into both of those things to sustain a podcast was both surprising and delightful.

(The exception is generally if you’re really into maths. Maths geeks – and occasionally engineers – who knit will nod understandingly and talk to me about Fibonacci sequences and the golden ratio and then be horrified that I’m not only not a maths geek but that I don’t actually like maths. Most sound designers seem to come from either a maths/engineering background or a music composition background, I’m neither, I’m first and foremost a craftsperson. Oddly enough, it wasn’t until I was altering a knitting pattern the other week – I didn’t have any graph paper to hand so I used an excel spreadsheet – that I realised that I visualise knitting designs the same way that I design soundscapes. Interchangeable blocks that layer and interweave to create something new and unique.)

Having spent the early months of this year clearing out my backlog of podcasts, I was able to justify subscribing to a few new ones and Knitsonik was naturally among the first to be chosen back in March. Why did it take until now for me to work my way through the backlog? Certainly not because the podcast isn’t interesting. It’s not even that the episodes are long, though that does mean I need to carve out time specifically to listen rather than sticking them on in short periods between other things. The problem with the podcast is that it’s…well…too interesting and inspiring. I couldn’t binge listen to it, because I came out of each episode really wanting to go and do some field recordings or make some sound art. Around 50% of my sound recording field trips this year, were as a direct result of listening to this podcast. I’d sit down with a pot of tea and some knitting on a Sunday afternoon intending to have a binge listen and a couple of hours later I’d be standing somewhere unexpected wearing my giant headphones, recording an interesting bird noise or weird echo and wondering vaguely how I’d got there.

I keep forgetting how much listening to other people be passionate about sound design and sound art stirs up my own passion for the work. (You would think that the exponential increase in my sound production work when the hospital radio station I used to volunteer with had an artist in residence would have clued me in but apparently not.) Sound is, in many ways, quite a solitary pursuit. Anti-social even. You spend a lot of time listening really hard to your environment; it’s quite hard to do in company unless you’re working on something that specifically needs another person to achieve. (The idea of embedding sound in a place, or in objects of the place the sound originates from, is increasingly important to me, especially since I relocated to the Highlands.) It is, therefore, quite easy to feel isolated in your work. Especially, if you don’t live in a large metropolis with an established community of sound artists. Even having an outlet like this blog, it can feel a bit like no-one’s listening.

Therefore, it’s been great to have this window into someone else’s sound projects, their passions and quirks, especially that rare confluence of viewing sound design/art as a craft with all that that implies. And oddly comforting to know that someone else finds sheep noises just as compelling and comical as I do.

Perhaps, if this year’s project was to write more about sound, then next year’s project should be to send more sound out into the world. Not just the stuff that I get paid to make, but the little projects that I make just for the joy of making soundscapes too.

Universal Goat, Frankenstein’s Castle and Other Overused Sound Effects

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bbc radiophonics, knitsonik, podcasts, radio 4, sound design, sound effects

I’ve been catching up on my podcast backlog this week and I came across something that struck a chord, but that has also come up in the general zeitgeist a few times over the last wee while. Over on the Knitsonik podcast – a podcast about knitting and sound art/design, it’s a niche interest group, but not as niche as I would have expected: I blame the golden ratio – there’s been an on-going discussion about ‘wrong’ sound effects in films, that was started off by a listener who keeps goats bemoaning the use of stock goat sounds that to her were really blatantly not belonging to the goats in question. What she termed ‘universal goat’. This in turn has led to lots of interesting stories and sound recordings of sounds in the wrong places and what the correct sounds should be. (Artic wolves in hill country that would actually be full of coyotes, tree frogs native to the Hollywood hills that turn up all over the place, and explain helpfully why I’ve never heard a frog go ‘ribbet’ in real life.) Additionally, last winter, there was a thread of conversation on Radio 4’s Film Programme about sound effects in the wrong place (Great Northern Divers are something of a short hand for frozen wastelands – shame they’re only found in the Artic and not in the Alps). Ammunition, if ever I heard it, for sound designers everywhere, when faced with a director insisting on their using a generic stock sound rather than hunting down an accurate one, to refute the ‘who’s going to notice’ argument. Clearly, not just us sound geeks.

My own personal version of the universal goat comes courtesy of the BBC Sound Effects Library. That glorious collection of CDs that lurked in the media departments of practically every university or college in the UK, courtesy of those fine folks at the Radiophonics workshop. The point towards the end of my Masters when I could actually pick out sound effects that I recognised in not only student films, but also actual commercial television and film, has probably shaped my attitude towards location recording, Foley and using library sound effects. Once you tune into a ‘wrong’ sound effect that is in common circulation, it becomes practically impossible not to hear it. Nearly a decade on, I’ll be watching an old Hammer Horror film or a Jon Pertwee Dr Who serial, there’ll be a storm and there it’ll be: ‘Frankenstein’s Castle (Rain, Thunder etc.)’. It’s a really good thunderstorm, nicely atmospheric, but by goodness does it get used a lot. It even turns up occasionally in modern low budget British horror films. I really hope that’s because sound designers are using it ironically – a knowing nod and a wink to genre savvy geeks in the audience – but I doubt it.

Part of the problem is, that sound is very powerful, it often completely bypasses our conscious brain, to press buttons in our brain we don’t necessarily even know we have. Particularly fear, it’s really, really good at fear. (Trust me on this. That was my dissertation topic; I could talk about it all day.) So we often come to associate particular sounds with particular emotional states when it comes to movie watching. Which is fine, but when it comes to making movies, both audiences and filmmakers come with a whole plethora of pre-conceptions – both conscious and unconscious – about how things ‘should’ sound. As a sound designer its very easy to get drawn into that trap, it would be very easy for me to forget, if I were recreating the sound of a forest at night that the sounds I associate with the woods of my childhood – deciduous woodland in the Lowlands of Scotland – aren’t necessarily going to be accurate to a pine forest in the Highlands. Because those sounds are familiar to me, they won’t sound obviously ‘wrong’ – the way a 1960s ambulance siren would sound out of place in a modern drama – because I expect them to be there. So it is with sounds that we associate with particular locales because we’ve only seen them in movies and they always have a certain soundscape. Audiences will sometimes find the ‘correct’ sound unconvincing because they’re so used to stock effects that are ‘wrong’ or over emphasised. Some directors will vehemently resist the use of a sound that is factually correct, because it doesn’t conform to their expectation, with their mental soundscape for how that location should sound. And still other occasions the actual sound just doesn’t sound dramatic or evocative enough – flesh tearing is actually a really quiet un-dramatic noise, you need to layer it with various other elements to actually get a sound with the right impact. Flesh is really good at deadening sound, meaning that punches mostly have more of a solid dull sound with very little echo, rather than the crisp neat bam of a lot of movie punches.

But, as with so much in sound design; the sign of really good sound work is when you don’t notice its there. If this discussion proves anything, it’s that audiences only really notice us, when we get it wrong. Which arguably, is how it should be.

Sound Inspirations

Tags

inspiration, sound art, sound design

I wanted to write something about sound that was making me feel inspired at the moment, because, well I’ve not been feeling particularly inspired recently and I need to remind myself of what inspires me and reconnect with it.

People Doing Excellent Work Within the System

I’ve not been to the cinema very often this year, and mostly only to see big blockbuster efforts which is pretty much the opposite of the ideal circumstances to hear good film sound. Everything’s painted in broad brushstrokes, soundscape just as much a characterisation and plot, and in most cinemas the soundtrack will be played Far. Too. Loud. (Turning it up to 11 doesn’t always make it better) Which is why of course I ended up seeing Gravity in 2D at an arts cinema where you can actually find an human being to adjust the sound if its gone wonky.

As any sound geek will tell you (and as the film tells the viewer in its opening moments) due to space being a vacuum its not possible for sound to be heard in space, so following that school of thought almost all the sound we hear in the film is strictly subjective; lots of breathing and radio transmissions. The sound traps us into the suits with the astronauts too, giving us the full claustrophobic experience. The sheer weight of the silence outside their little bubbles is like a physical weight pressing down on them, as relentless as gravity, and the astronauts’ communications, narrating their actions (especially after they lose contact with Earth) and telling each other – and the ether – stories to fight off the silence is a vital part of the film’s atmosphere as well as its soundscape. The way the radio broadcasts act as lifelines just as much as the tethers do, from Matt’s country music and stories told to keep Ryan from passing out as she runs low on Oxygen, to the banter and warnings from mission control (especially the astronauts reporting back to ‘Houston in the blind’ just in case they can be heard back on Earth, to Ryan’s two-way incomprehensible conversation with a Chinese farmer/radio operator, it says a fair bit about the human urge to communicate and reach out to each other even when they don’t/can’t understand and manages to be rather emotive as well. The sound is subtle and rarely foregrounded, the score is barely noticeable – and when it is briefly noticeable it feels grating and wrong – and all the more powerful for that. Less is more after all, but when it needs to be my goodness it packs a punch.

(I knew Glen Freemantle’s name was familiar from somewhere, he’s been sound designer on almost all of Danny Boyle’s films, include Sunshine which has frankly excellent sound – I can’t believe I haven’t written about it before, must remedy that and soon.)

People Being Experimental and Adventurous

Soundry. In their own words, ‘an online creative listening laboratory and magazine…[that]…publish existing work and help artists create new work with the aim of sharing sounds that enrich and transform ways of listening to the noise and silence of everyday life’. Essentially they’re collating all the weird and wonderful sound projects and experiments going on out there that you might otherwise miss. They’re mostly on tumblr, which is a nice change, as it means their posts just show up in the flow of my dashboard when I’ve had a long hard day at work and can’t cope with anything more complex than a flow of pretty pictures but could really use something strange and imaginative to kick me back into gear. (There’s just so much on twitter these days that it’s easy to miss the good stuff)

I first stumbled across them via a posting on, I think, Central Station, calling for submissions to their postcards project. Essentially, you submit a photograph with a minute of sound that captures the atmosphere of the place you took the photo. It’s a really simple idea, but there’s something really evocative about the way the sound postcards capture little moments in time and place. Proper slice of life stuff.

Edinburgh Water of Life. Stumbled across on the Scotland Introducing podcast of all places, its Tommy Perman of FOUND (and weird and wonderful composing efforts for the Riverside museum fame) and singer songwriter Rob St John, recording and sampling the sounds of Edinburgh waterways with underwater microphones combining natural and unnatural sounds and making music with them. If you pop over to their website you can hear some of the source recordings (which are rather fascinating in their own right), some samples of the finished tracks and read all about the research and adventures they had on this arts/science project of theirs. I’ve a deep abiding love of contact microphones but having listened to this I really want to experiment with hydrophone microphones now. I had a pretty good summer this year, but I kind of wish it’d been more like theirs…

Mark’s Sri Lankan adventures. Actually this one needs a bit more explanation. So, I run the Production Team at the radio station based at Forth Valley Royal Hospital, Radio Royal. Last year we were lucky enough to have an artist in residence Mark Vernon – well, actually he belonged to the hospital itself but we got to work closely with him. Which led to the Channel 604 project, which in turn really fired up my production team about the potential to do interesting things with sound. It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day work of the production team, making jingles, promos and adverts, teaching new starts the basics of audio editing, and forget that actually the point of the team is to do ‘different’ stuff. Having Mark around and hearing the positive responses from people to the project (whether as participants or audience members) were a timely reminder that there is in fact an audience for something that wee bit different out there. It made us get out there with our giant headphones and tiny recording devices, interview people and record the world. We made things and tried things and generally got very excited and geeky about sound. But of course things tailed off, the residency finished, deadlines reared their ugly heads and generally we got distracted. But lo, a few weeks ago an email appeared, turns out that Mark’s out in Sri Lanka on residency working on a project for the Colombo Art Biennale next year. He’s sent back a sound diary of his adventures and once again weird, mundane and wonderful sounds are filling the room, snapshots of adventures half the world away. I can feel my inspiration waking up, looking around blearily and fixating on that one patch of blue sky amongst all the heavy grey.

It’s time to stop talking, grab the giant headphones, put fresh batteries in the Roland or the Marantz, get out there and listen.