What is a soundscape?
For those of you (like myself) that has heard this term in passing conversation before but never knew what the term 'soundscape' actually meant. A Soundscape - term coined by R. Murray Schafer - is a sound or combination of sounds that forms an immersive environment. A soundscape can be in the form of an audio recording or performance of sounds to create the sensation of experiencing a particular environment.
For this soundscape I was tasked to come up with some sounds and an instrumental to have the audience or perceiver feel as though they are immersed in their very own horror space. I had to do some research on the aesthetics of horror to do this as I am not your typical horror fan or Buff.
Research:
I first did some research into what makes something feel like it has horror themes.
An interesting book I read was called Horror Movie Aesthetics: How colour, time, space and sound elicit fear in an audience.
In this Book I learned, in relation specifically to sound that there are certain notes that are considered disturbing to the human ear. Using chords structured around these particular notes is what gives something that unexplainable unnerving or uneasy feeling when you hear it. It is a subconscious reaction to the audio you are hearing. The notes are usually in the form of a tritone. (A tritone is two notes that are 3 steps apart on a tone scale) Tritones usually sound out of place and don't fit comfortably within its surrounds.
I also spent some time on youtube and listening to some horror movie soundtracks for inspiration when I stumbled upon this youtube video published by user Marc Jungermann.
In the video above Marc expressed an idea that you can use common household items to create some sounds that out of the original context, could be perceived through the senses that it could be something scarier.
Coincidentally I had also just learned about Foley and how to create sounds for sound replacement in another project I did earlier. This helped immensely for creating sounds for this project. I also wanted to test the theory in the youtube video about creating horrifying sounds using common household available things and if using a basic recording app on my phone could make passable and basic horror sound assets for this soundscape project.
So then, What makes something fit into the Horror category?
During the research of horror for this project I discovered that there are also many sub-genres of horror. There is psychological, thriller, supernatural, torture, found- footage just to name a few types. So I also had to keep this in mind as there is a visual that was created for my sound assets. I feel the sound and the visual together could fall nicely into the supernatural and psychological sub-genre of horror. I believe this because the visual doesn't really tell you a lot about the particular horror environment you have been immersed in, however coupled with the randomisation of the sound assets it leaves the audience thinking about what they just saw and heard. (and why can I hear children, where are they?) This is usually the desired aim for the audience to feel after seeing or hearing something creepy.
All of the different sub-genres of horror have one thing in common. They generally juxtapose some sort of image (or sound) of innocence, like children, and they flip it around to something that is unbelievable. (Chucky or Orphanage, creepy! am I right?) A common trend I noticed in the sound design aspect of these horror films is the grainy and roughness in the texture of the recorded sounds. Although most likely recorded in a studio setting I wasn't sure if this effect was achieved in the recording or post production stage. So I decided to ask fellow producers and sound designers about different recording/ processing styles specifically in relation to the horror genre. After these conversations with peers and also considering the youtube video, I decided to take a step further, testing a theory I had heard and record only on my phone. I choose to do this because I wanted to test if recording sound assets that way would give the grainy and rough around the edges kind of out of place quality that I was aiming for with the sound assets.
This is the link to the sound assets just after recording with no processing or anything done to them:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=12mjAQEHvSgG-8vAwgTiqh_7E7-NehFIA
When I had the sound assets together I then did some more research into different styles of horror soundscapes before doing any manipulation or processing on any of my recordings.
Below are some of soundscapes I looked at to garner some inspiration and try to mimic in coming up with my own soundscape.
My recording and sound assets process in depth:
To get sound assets or samples I just decided to use my Samsung Galaxy note 8 and the built in microphone and a free voice recorder app I downloaded.
I chose this method for the recordings as I knew the recordings weren't going to be clean cut and perfect. This means less editing and distortion will need to be added to the audio as it would have its own natural grainy effect due to the use of a phone microphone instead of a studio or recording quality microphone. The sounds recorded would then be suited to fit in with the aesthetics of a cam corder held perspective or low quality budget horror film.
Time to record:
The first things I chose to record was my nephew saying some catchphrases and I also recorded a couple of his friends laughing as they were playing. I also recorded my cats doing different meows and cat sounds. I did this as in some horror films the innocence of children and animals is used in a parallel way. The innocence of these things draw you in until you realised that that innocence is then warped into something sinister instead, to refresh here is the link to the sound assets I recorded.
Also recorded was the following:
After some further editing in protools (playing around with EQ to change or enhance the texture, playing with some distortion as well) I sent these assets to the design/ Film people on my team, Alexander Hollingworth, Catherine F and Michael Csanyi.
As a result this was the final cut of the sound scape with the sound assets. The video was made using premiere pro.
Jungermann, M. (2017). Let's Make a HORROR SOUNDSCAPE w/ Household Items. [online] YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgEInruDuNc
Fu, X., Offenhuber, D., McDonald, A., Scott, D., Starr, T., Kloeckl, K., Cruz, P. and Felde, N. (2016). Horror movie aesthetics: how color, time, space and sound elicit fear in an audience.. [online] Hdl.handle.net. Available at: http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20211378
YouTube. (2010). Paddy - Another Creepy Ambient Soundscape. [online] Available at: https://youtu.be/UjL8KLjwzH8
Youtube (2017) DannyThewildboy - HORROR SOUNDSCAPE [online] Available at https://youtu.be/sOlN50wawG8
Youtube (2017) Blue Lavasix - Creepy Children in Horror Films | Darkology #13 [online] Available at https://youtu.be/GWTKzYD0IP8
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