How to Make a Soundscape Film

Short Essay

The soundscape of a film defines its perception, yet it is often neglected. While watching RIAFN, a cinematic journey into the soundscape of the Alps, our writer decided to write a short guide to making a soundscape documentary, in five steps.

A soundscape documentary film is a kind of a cinematic journey through the sounds of a certain region. While a region may be visually recognisable, nature itself rarely has a characteristic sound. It is man- or animal-made noises that give a region its typical sound. Documenting these representative sounds, in combination with pictures, can be extremely mesmerizing if it’s done well. But the key to a soundscape documentary is a great arc of suspense. The question is how to create such an arc, even though a documentary doesn’t tell a story. The following five-point guide aims to offer a response to this question.

1. Material
You need footage and sound recordings. Everything depends on how valuable your material is. Valuable material is authentic material. This isn’t about the virtuosity of the man-made sounds. Virtuosity became boring in the 21^st century: The arts reached an incredibly high technical level and skills are outstanding in each art form. This leads to oversaturation. So pay attention to rare, earthy, and lusty sounds rather than sophisticated or complex ones. Try to find the sounding soul of a certain region.

2. Spatiality and Reverberation
You may not need a great variety of different sounds, but you need the greatest possible variety of different spaces: Close miking, distant miking, ambience recordings. Catch every sound with different reverberations and every picture from different angles and perspectives. This gives you maximum editing options.

3. Manipulation and Transformation
Be careful with sound editing. Of course you can enhance your recordings to a certain extent. But sound manipulation leads quickly to alienation. If drastically changed, the sounds lose their genuineness and their connection with the visuals. Transformation and manipulation are artistic tools. Use them sparsely in a documentary.

4. Pulse and Rhythm
Try to find a pulse for your film. Be aware of the relation between the cutting rhythm and the rhythm of the recorded sounds. Use rhythms when they occur. Any kind of machine produces rhythm; or a walking herd of cows, for example, produces a phenomenal bell rhythm. Create rhythm in certain sections by combining sound files.

5. Compression and Interlocking
A movie isn’t an image of a situation but a portrayal. Never try to transfer the situation one-to-one with your camera and the microphone. Sitting in the cinema auditorium, the spectators of your film are in a completely different situation than you are out in the field. Therefore their perception is completely different. The silence of the Mongolian steppe, for example, is a stunning experience, but you can’t reproduce that by raising your mike and recording nothing.

Let It Overlap

In a documentary you must retell your experiences and observations by other means. Compress and interlock your sound and video material, let it overlap and merge. Draw up a musical score for your sounds and take into account silence, loudness, intensity, pace, tempo, and range of sounds.

Following these five steps doesn’t guarantee that you will create a great movie, just as reading a composition instruction book doesn’t guarantee that you will compose a great symphony. But thinking about these points may bring you to other results when making a film. Most of all, it may show you a different perspective, or give you greater enjoyment, if you are watching a soundscape documentary.

Trailer

Biography

Dieter Ringli, geboren 1968 in Küsnacht ZH, erhielt schon früh klassischen Unterricht in Klavier, später auch in Querflöte und sammelte musikalische Erfahrungen als Gitarrist in Blues- und Hardrock-Bands, aber auch als Männerchorleiter. Er studierte schliesslich Musikwissenschaft und Musikethnologie in Zürich, arbeitete dann als Assistent am Musikethnologischen Archiv der Universität Zürich und doktorierte 2003 mit einer Arbeit über die «Schweizer Volksmusik im Zeitalter der technischen Reproduktion». Er ist derzeit Oberassistent an der Universität Zürich und Dozent an der Musikhochschule Luzern und lebt mit seiner Frau und zwei Töchtern im Zürcher Oberland.

Published on November 20, 2021

Last updated on April 09, 2024

Topics

Soundscape

Perception

All Topics

Snap

print as pdf

Filmstill: «Sisters with Transistors», Lisa Rovner, 2020.

Electronic Adventurers

Review

by Ruth Saxelby

While it provides Ruth Saxelby with more than one epiphany, and helps her consider her own past, Sisters with Transistors: Electronic Music’s Unsung Heroines is a drop in the ocean of electronic music history, making her yearn for more.

I was in the little kid version of the Girl Scouts when I was eight. It didn’t feel good. Not the badge collecting, not the gendered activities, not the swearing of patriotic allegiances. I enjoyed telling the group’s po-faced leader I was quitting because I didn’t believe in God or the Queen. That was true, but it wasn’t the whole truth. I was also fed up with missing the beginning of Doctor Who.

Sylvester McCoy had just taken over as the seventh Doctor on the long-running British sci-fi show. McCoy’s Doctor was equal parts silly and philosophical. I imagine time travel necessitates both states; the one the other’s foil, and each a relative of wonder. The show’s theme tune planted those seeds. This way, its cosmic textures seemed to beckon, lie questions and adventures. A doorway to another dimension, it was the sound of feelings I wasn’t yet able to put a finger on.

Sound Abstracted

It would be decades before I learned that the original music was made in the early 1960s by English composer Delia Derbyshire. She worked for the BBC’s sound effects unit, also known as the Radiophonic Workshop. The composer Ron Grainer had written a score for Doctor Who and Derbyshire was asked to bring it to life. The ideas and innovation she brought to her arrangement prompted Grainer to regard her as a co-composer. Derbyshire used multiple tape machines in a musique concrète manner. By manipulating the tape both before playback (cutting and splicing it) and during (slowing it down or speeding it up), she painstakingly created the theme’s otherworldly sounds and urgent rhythms.

Derbyshire’s interest in building atmosphere from audio had a more earthly origin. «I was in Coventry during The Blitz [of World War II]», Derbyshire says in the documentary Sisters with Transistors: Electronic Music’s Unsung Heroines. «That was such an influence on me. It’s come to me that my love for abstract sounds [came from] air-raid sirens. Because that’s a sound you hear and you don’t know the source of it as a young child. It’s an abstract sound and it’s meaningful and then the ‹all-clear›. Well, that’s electronic music.»

Electronic Epiphanies

Later in the documentary, which is almost entirely made of archival footage, the American composer Pauline Oliveros discusses her own philosophy in a TV interview. «I am not interested in making an object of art and entertainment», she says. «I’m interested in making something that helps me to grow and expand and change as an individual, and in relation to others.»

These two ideas – that abstract sounds are meaningful, and that composing with such an understanding can be transformative – are not only crucial to an appreciation of electronic music, they open doors to endless worlds of wonder. And yet by the end of Sisters with Transistors, the wondering I’m left with is about the truly unsung. The electronic adventurers who didn’t make it into the archives. The stories still waiting to be told and the ones with gaping holes in them. One documentary is a drop and I'm thirsty for the ocean.

The film «Sisters with Transistors: Electronic Music’s Unsung Heroines» by Lisa Rovner was officially selected at the Norient Film Festival NFF 2021. See full program here.

Trailer

Biography

Ruth Saxelby is a writer and editor based in New York. Follow her on her Website.

Published on November 22, 2021

Last updated on April 11, 2024

Topics

Creativity

Sound

All Topics

print as pdf

Portrait of Guy Baron (photo: Robert Bartholot, Berlin 2021).

Post-Euphoria – The Ambivalence of Remembering: Part 3

Short Essay

by Guy Baron

In the third part of the series Post-Euphoria, Guy Baron reflects on his use of audio effects to suggest the faded recollection of lost euphoric experiences.

In «Forget U», I used my voice to re-record a vocal line from Zara Larsson and MNEK’s single «Never Forget You» (2015). I attempted to examine how the act of quoting such a song, with its dance pop sensibilities, can suggest the re-evocation of blissful moments. I digitally edited the re-recorded five-word phrase («I will never forget you»), creating an additional, reconfigured phrase («I will forget you»). I further embedded these vocal elements in an instrumental arrangement that references electronic dance music production – specifically, build-up sections conventionally aimed at inducing euphoric states amongst dancing crowds (Solberg 2014) – yet without including a kick drum. In the complementary recording «Reprise», I processed an excerpt from «Forget U» using a grain delay effect plug-in that samples and adds delay between fragments of audio material (Sasso 2012).

A Memory that Never Fades?

Larsson and MNEK’s song initially caught my attention in the midst of a relationship breakup. It struck me with its determined statement about a memory that seemingly never fades. By isolating and duplicating the phrase, I sought to emphasise this message – but also to point out its peculiarity. Through recreating and digitally editing variations of the original phrase, I was also interested in elaborating its meaning and presenting a more ambivalent reality: as the word «never» is digitally cut out to form the phrase «I will forget you», the meaning of the sentence is inverted, suggesting a thin line between the remembering and the forgetting of once-blissful experiences.

The instrumental arrangement of «Forget U» further embodies notions of faded recollection. Recreating stripped-down motifs from electronic dance music, I sought to convey muted and missing dancefloor euphoria – underlined by the lack of elements deemed fundamental to electronic dance music productions, such as a four-on-the-floor kick drum. In addition – and unlike electronic dance music productions, where the build-up usually progresses to a bass-heavy drop section – here the arrangement remains suspended and unresolved throughout. What emerges from this arrangement strategy is a musical aesthetic that dwells on absence and unfulfillment, suggesting partial and transformed memories of recollected euphoric moments.

<br />

A Fleeting Flashback

As the musical matter of «Forget U» undergoes radical processing and transformation in «Reprise», it is presented as fluid and malleable and just about recognisable. Brief and structureless, the latter recording suggests a fleeting flashback to a bygone experience. The fragmentation of sonic grains, as induced by the application of grain delay, figuratively suggests how memories of yearned-for experiences may shift and become fragmented over time.

These meanings are further conveyed through placing the recordings alongside one another as part of an integrated body of work, presenting «Reprise» as a faded afterthought of «Forget U».

List of References

Sasso, Len. 2012. «Ableton live: Grain Delay». SoundCloud. Accessed October 5, 2021. (https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/ableton-live-grain-delay).

Solberg, Ragnhild Torvanger. 2014. «Waiting for the Bass to Drop: Correlations Between Intense Emotional Experiences and Production Techniques in Build-up and Drop Sections of Electronic Dance Music». Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, 61–82.

Discography

Emenike, Uzo, Zara Larsson & Arron Davey. 2015. Zara Larsson & MNEK – Never Forget You (single). [Sound Recording] (TEN, Virgin EMI, Epic).

This article is the third of a four-part series on the practice-based music research project «Post-Euphoria» by Guy Baron aka Semi Precious.

Biography

Guy Baron holds a PhD in music production practice and serves as an associate lecturer at London South Bank University, conducting practice-based research in music production. He works as a music practitioner under the name Semi Precious, with his releases being endorsed by Electronic Sound Magazine, The Sunday Times and The Guardian for their conceptual songwriting approach. Baron’s previous works focused on sampling of easy listening music and included a Channel-4 audio-visual commission exploring aspects of queer club utopia. He currently co-runs the electronic music record label and artist collective, squareglass. Follow him on Instagram, and Facebook.

Published on November 16, 2021

Last updated on April 30, 2024

Topics

Music Production

Technology

Nostalgia

All Topics

Special

Post-Euphoria – A Practice-Based Music Research

print as pdf

words

How to Make a Soundscape Film

Biography

Topics

Snap

Electronic Adventurers

Biography

Topics

Post-Euphoria – The Ambivalence of Remembering: Part 3

List of References

Discography

Biography

Topics

Special

films

images

sounds

words