Home Music Studio5 Academic About
Harry E. Pistore 2021
TABLE OF CONTENT
Structure and Presentation
- – Spatial Audio 4
- – Music 4
- – Visuals 5
Technical Aspects
- – Seaside 6
- – Boat6
- – Underwater 7
- – Ambience 7
- – Submarine 7
- – Whale 9
- – Tropical Forest 10
- – Ambience 10
- – Insect 10
Similar Work 11
Challenges 12
Conclusion 14
Bibliography 15
INTRODUCTION
This project is based on a soundwalk that aims at exploring spatial sound of natural sources in three environments: seaside, underwater and tropical forest. All of them are related to a tropical environment where the main goal is to induce peacefulness and meditation. This idea came from listening to ambient recordings during the pandemic which made me feel better and I thought to create a similar work in my own way.
In a study by the University College London it was found that just around 15 minutes of audio guided meditation through an app would improve wellbeing and decrease stress (Bostock, 2019).
This soundwalk takes place on an island and it is mostly based on realism with sounds naturally occurring in this specific location, from animals, plants and man-made constructions. Although the absence of footsteps sound may add a bit of surrealism and dream-like quality to it. According to Krause, a popular soundscape ecologist, every location has its signature, due to the information shared by its landscape diversity, which is divided into geophony, biophony and anthrophony (Ted, 2013).
My project takes the shape of a binaural audio experience, according to Erica Basnicki an audio composition to be immersive should have audio objects and scenes broadcast through multiple channels (Ramsey, 2015). In this case binaural audio focuses on distance and direction but not so much on altitude as it is hard to create on binaural.
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STRUCTURE AND PRESENTATION
Spatial Audio
Spatial audio is present in our everyday life but we rarely become aware of it, in fact it started to gain popularity only in the 20th century with stereo. Pink Floyd worked on quad for some of their work in the 70s but did not have much success (Ramsay, 2018) as it implied having 4 speakers at home which isn’t even that common nowadays.
According to Watson when producing cinema work, live performance or music, we should always have spatial audio in mind, technology now can put the audience right where the microphone was at the time of recording. Video-games are the platforms that are quickly gaining ground in spatial audio and more specifically virtual reality for both gaming and relaxation. “TheBlu” is in fact an award winning immersive experience taking place underwater (Wevr, 2018) and mainly designed for relaxation.
Music
Because of the nature of this project I chose not to have music elements as they may be distracting and reduce the meditation inducement that I’m looking for. According to Winston, music may carry emotions and associate memories, this can potentially act as a catalyst preventing the right ground for relaxation (Beckham, 2020) as the music may not reflect the listener’s mood in that very moment.
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I’m always sceptical of guided meditations that carry music as I could get easily distracted by certain emotions that may arise by the melodies used.
Visuals
The video is predominantly used to help the immersiveness of the walk by enhancing the listening experience. Initially the audio wasn’t meant to be synchronised to the video footage but on a later examination this seemed more like an error rather than an artistic choice.
The visuals were made after the audio but then the latter was re-adapted to the visual flow to render the experience more immersive, by getting all those elements more in sync. For example the whale sound needed to be in sync with the moving image but when it wasn’t, it felt wrong and this was interrupting the relaxation indument.
Final Cut Pro was the software used to build the video footage which was slightly slowed down to encourage peacefulness, while crossfaders were used to merge all the different sceneries so as to avoid abrupt changes in between them which may disrupt the meditational element of the walk.
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TECHNICAL ASPECTS
Seaside
The sound of the sea was quite easy to record with my ZoomH1 field recording mic which is a stereo microphone with a 90 ° X / Y stereo array but I needed to use DearVR MICRO to binaurally sync the sound to the visuals, using the azimuth wheel to automate the horizontal plane effect and implement a stereo widening to spread it a bit more.
When approaching the palms, the sea sound slightly changes due to the wind and the reflections caused by the vegetation, so a concert hall reverb was added on both sounds and also to the seagulls to make them feel far deep into the vegetation.
These recordings needed some editing such as by-passing the low-end frequencies on the sea sound and the seagulls, using a compressor on the waves which at times were too low or too loud, while the wind was made with pink noise with a VST synth and an LFO to add some imperfections to it.
Boat
The sound of the waves hitting the empty boat was done by recording a half full water bottle with my ZoomH1, this was then pitched down by three octaves to make it sound lower in altitude but also thicker and larger. A simple gentle reverb was added to mimic the reflections of the wooden bay.
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Underwater
Ambience
Here the underwater sound was done by using a JRF Hydrophone submerged in a sink full of water and by creating some movements to mimic the sound of the underwater ocean current (Pro Sound Effects, 2017). I had to have two channels of different water sound and with dearVR MICRO I was able to automate the panning of the recordings to make them sound coming from all sides, recreating the difference of sound perceived by the left and right ear. A small reverb was added to mimic the current moving far away or hitting objects in the distance.
A bubbling noise moving around the listener can be heard too, which was recorded by blowing with a straw in a glass full of water to reproduce the oxygen tank noise.
Submarine
This was made instead with a VST synthesiser by listening to some real recordings made by divers (Jeankikine, 2019). Using hardware gear is also how Watson would work at times by creating sounds on his Vermona analogue synthesiser for his compositions (Flint, T. 2018),
On a closer analysis this sound had to be in the region of 2.5 / 4.5 khz (Pic. 1) so the one I made was done with one sine wave oscillator, a sawtooth on a lower octave and a high pitch C sharp in the range of 4 khz with an added convolution reverb (Pic. 2) to recreate a similar reverb in underwater conditions.
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Pic. 1 – Submarine Sound frequency between 2.5kh and 4.5kh.
Pic. 2 – Convolution reverb
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Whale
The sound of the whale was downloaded online, as I’ve tried to recreate it with a synth without great success. This sound is mono and it works perfectly because of the directionality I needed, in fact the animal comes from one specific side and swims to the opposite.
There is also a reverb on it to simulate the reflection of the space from the whale direction, of which high frequency had to be tamed because sounds above 1 khz travels slower underwater so are less audible. The reverb used is a simple hall reverb which was enough to recreate the feel of the sound approaching underwater.
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Tropical Forest
Ambience
The ambience sound is a combination of layers, one is white noise with an LFO to simulate a constant breeze and the other is the same sea noise but very low in volume and with a very long reverb to simulate its distance and the vegetation acting as a sound absorbent. Here more low-end frequencies are present than high-end ones.
Insect
The ticking insect sound at 2:59 was created by using a closed hi-hat which I wanted it to sound similar to something real but it may also sound like some kind of fictional animal. This sound comes and goes and as the walk progresses it feels farther away.
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SIMILAR WORK
When talking about realism, the work of Pierre Shaeffer is very important to take into consideration as it is one of the first that used frangemented sounds and contextualised it in a composition, he would use field recordings of any origin that were then edited in a studio (Fact team, 2016). Shaeffer was of great inspiration for Chris Watson and his recording strategy, one of the main works that he was influenced by was the Paris railway station recording in 1948.
I’ve tried to follow the “less is more” tip by Watson as he tells how he used to record everything and realised that many sounds weren’t actually that good to be used in a composition and instead focus on a few really good ones. For this reason and also because of my project which aims at conveying relaxation, I chose to have just one or two ambience sounds such as breeze and sea waves and then a few other sounds which belong to the environment without cluttering it too much (Flint, T. 2018). Krause’s composition “The Great Animal Orchestra” is instead meant to recreate the actual realism of that particular environment and to study the relation between biophony, geophony and anthrophony (Pallamidessi, 2021). His work usually focuses on understanding how an environment may be affected by global warming or other causes, by recording instances of the same location over a few years apart.
In an interview Hildegard Westerkamp describes how she would walk around with her Zoom microphone to record like our ears would normally hear the world. She would record hundreds of pieces and mix them organically in order to retain the character of the place recorded (INA grm, 2016). In terms of scenery change during a soundwalk, I found her Kits Beach piece very inspiring, she explains how it starts from realism and delves into the abstract with sound of high frequencies, inner spaces and dreams.
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CHALLENGES
Problems that I have encountered is the ambiguity in binaural in regards to auditory localisation when reproducing altitude for example of seagulls or the back and front of the bubbles going around the listener underwater. One way to tackle the altitude issue is working with a pitch shifter, as high pitch frequencies are perceived higher in altitude than lower ones (Universitaet Bielefeld, 2014). Sennheiser dearVR is somehow replicating this effect with its Elevation fader (Pic 3), which clearly works with a hidden pitch shifter and an EQ to mimic the perception of altitude.
Pic. 3 DearVR MICRO Elevation settings
This option isn’t very accurate but by looking at the visuals it is easier to trick the brain into thinking that the object should be in the position as seen on the screen. This is called “Suspension of Disbelief” which explains how an audience while watching a video believes that what they hear is what they see, even if they know it may not be true (Hooks, 2011).
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Without a visual cue it would be harder to identify the localisation of altitude or back and front using binaural. Pic. 4 represents a typical 11.1 setup with 4 speakers on the ceiling to recreate altitude.
Pic. 4 – A typical 11.1 setup
In real life the way we understand sound localisation is via HRTF which is how our hearing system detects the transformation of a sound travelling from a source to our ears, this transformation is effectively a change in the volume, pitch and time that helps us localise an object around us (Schneider, 2016).
Another challenge was recording outdoor sounds during the daytime which instead was much simpler to do during the night, where noise pollution was fairly less.
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CONCLUSION
I ran some tests and asked five people to watch my full project and found that the greater percentage was expecting extra sounds present while watching and more syncing accuracy between video and audio. This, according to a study by the University of York, has nothing to do with “senses hierarchy” but instead with culture (University of York, 2018).
However, in line with this test I’ve tried to make the synchronisation more accurate and implement the project with more sounds to increase the level of details and excitement which may help enhance the immersiveness of the project.
My initial intentions were not focused on the video as much as the audio but found that by working with both, they had to be elevated equally in order to convey the relaxation and immersiveness I was looking for. If discrepancies were found either in their synchronisation or in the absence of certain sounds while watching the visuals, frustration would arise hindering the level of immersiveness.
I feel this work could be used professionally and converted for VR but the scenes would need to be extended to at least 5 minutes each, to get at least a 15 minute immersive experience for it to induce the right level of relaxation.
Since this project I feel more aware of the immersiveness of sound and I will certainly apply some psychoacoustics to my own work in order to expand from the usual linear way of mixing in stereo to surround systems or binaural.
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Bibliography
Beckham, 2020 “Can you even meditate without new-age music, man?”. Available at:
https://mashable.com/article/meditation-mindfulness-music (Accessed on: 15 April 2022)
Bostock, S., Crosswell, A., Prather, A., 2019 “Mindfulness on-the-go: Effects of a mindfulness meditation app on work stress and well-being”. Available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6215525
(Accessed on: 17 April 2022)
Fact team, 2016 “A guide to Pierre Schaeffer, the godfather of sampling”. Available at:
(Accessed on: 16 April 2022)
Flint, T. 2018 “Chris Watson: The Art Of Location Recording”. Available at:
https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/chris-watson-art-location-recording
(Accessed on: 26 April 2022)
Hooks, E. 2011 “The Willing Suspension of Disbelief”. Available at:
https://www.awn.com/blog/willing-suspension-disbelief#:~:text=In%20a%20nutshell%2C%2 0the%20willing,to%20empathize%20with%20the%20actors
(Accessed on: 18 April 2022)
INA grm, 2016 “Hildegard WESTERKAMP_PRESENCES électronique 2016”. Available at:
(Accessed on: 9 May 2022)
Jeankikine 2019 “first meeting with a submarine sonar”. Available at:
https://youtu.be/sCmyZYYR7_s (Accessed on: 20 April 2022)
Pallamidessi, J. 2021 “Bernie Krause – The Great Animal Orchestra”. Available at :
https://youtu.be/btrinTDDjnQ (Accessed on: 15 May 2022)
Pro Sound Effects 2017 “Recording Underwater Submersion Sound Effects with a
Hydrophone”. Available at: https://youtu.be/XPAMje-sA68 (Accessed on: 19 April 2022)
Ramsey, C. 2015 “Feature: The rise of immersive audio”. Available at:
(Accessed on: 27 April 2022)
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Ted, 2013 “Bernie Krause: The voice of the natural world”. Available at: https://youtu.be/uTbA-mxo858 (Accessed on: 13 May 2022)
Schneider, A. 2016 “Studies in Musical Acoustics and Psychoacoustics”. Springer International Publishing. P. 300. (Accessed on: 11 May 2022)
Universitaet Bielefeld, 2014 “Why auditory pitch and spatial elevation get high together: Shape of human ear may have evolved to mirror acoustics in natural world”.
Available at: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/04/140408111431.htm (Accessed on: 11 May 2022)
University of York, 2018 “Is there a universal hierarchy of human senses?”. Available at:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/11/181105160852.htm
(Accessed on: 10 May 2022)
Westerkamp, 1989 “Kits Beach Soundwalk (1989)”. Available at:
https://www.hildegardwesterkamp.ca/sound/comp/3/kitsbeach
(Accessed on: 11 May 2022)
Wevr, 2018 “theBlu Season1 Trailer”. Available at:
(Accessed on: 20 April 2022)
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