BA Sound art – Page 5

Ryuichi Sakamoto

Japanese musician, composer and performer Ryuichi Sakamoto’s score for The Wilderness Hunter won many awards at the 69th BAFTAs, including Best Film and Best Sound, and was nominated for major awards including Best Original Score.

When I was researching him I found a documentary about him called < Ryuichi Sakamoto: CODA>. I’ve recommended it to my friends and I think it’s a very interesting film and I’ve learnt a lot.

This is a personal documentary by renowned filmmaker and director Stephen Nomura-Skipper. The film follows Ryuichi Sakamoto’s work and personal life after his throat cancer. The main part of the film features Ryuichi Sakamoto’s work on the soundtrack for the film “The Wilderness Hunter”, and the soundtrack for “The Wilderness Hunter”, which is also included in the film, became the original soundtrack for the documentary. The soundtrack of The Wilderness Hunter is the original soundtrack of the documentary, serving both as a documentary and as a reality check. The audience is treated to a glimpse of the musician’s life while watching the production of the soundtrack.

In his works, Ryuichi Sakamoto has arranged a large number of realistic ambient sounds, turning the world of cinema into a mirror of reality through the mapping of sound and film, bringing the film score into the realm of humanistic thinking. For example, in Ryuichi Sakamoto: The Finale, a piano was used to play the music that was washed away by the tsunami after the earthquake in Japan. This way of combining reality and touching the true nature of the world transcends the music itself, elevating the act of film scoring into the realm of humanistic expression, and even extending it into a kind of performance art, fulfilling a realistic concern beyond the musician’s voice. In addition to the above-mentioned choice of ethnic instruments and the arrangement of natural sounds, Ryuichi Sakamoto’s musical compositions also often include a deep sense of cross-cultural exchange. In his film score, The Wilderness Hunter, Ryuichi Sakamoto, in a departure from his usual style, makes extensive use of the original ambient sounds of the Nordic ice fields, with the addition of electronic melodies, resulting in a score that both fits the context of the film and reflects his personal interests, laying the foundation for the film’s intention and narrative. It is worth noting that Ryuichi Sakamoto experimented with film scoring in Asia in the late 1980s, and that the 1987 film The Last Emperor, directed by the Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci, was scored by Ryuichi Sakamoto on location in the Forbidden City in Beijing, a historic move to have a foreigner tell the story of China. Ryuichi Sakamoto, who had never visited China before the film was made, and had never been exposed to Chinese culture, was able to produce the film’s score and performance through a detailed exchange with a Chinese composer. This example demonstrates the cross-cultural possibilities of musical exchange, and the possibility of ‘mother-topic’ expression. Intercultural communication is not a deliberate search for the boundaries of ‘self’ or ‘other’, but rather a search for ‘cultural matrices’ that follow from the ‘cultural imaginary’. It is a search for the “cultural matrix” after the “cultural imagination”.

After watching this documentary, I felt that the film score is both an expression on the world stage and an emotional support on the road of life for Ryuichi Sakamoto. The important musical works that he has composed in the fertile soil of Asian culture with a true heart represent the East, belong to the East and express the East, and make the unique charm of the East in the soundtrack in the process of world cinema exchange. In Ryuichi Sakamoto’s scores, the multiplicity of reality is intertwined with the realism of cinema, and the Orient in film is thus unfolded.

Makoto Oshiro

Makoto Oshiro (b. 1978, Okinawa) is a Berlin Tokyo-based performer and artist. His primary medium is sound, but he also combines other elements including light, electricity and movement of objects. In live performances, he uses self-made tools and instruments that are based on electronic devices, every day materials, and junk. His installation work handles sound as a physical and auditory phenomenon, and focuses on characteristics such as vibration and interference.

2022. [online] Available at: <https://www.cafeoto.co.uk/artists/makoto-oshiro/> .

This is the work of Makoto Oshiro that I found when I was looking for information about him. The name is ‘Mono-beat Cinema’ and it was shown in 2010.

A sine wave is produced by a loudspeaker placed in front of a cathode-ray tube TV display. The frequency produced by the loudspeaker is heard as sound, but the loudspeaker’s vibration can also be sensed as a visual phenomena. Simultaneously, when the screen image of the TV monitor is examined from the standpoint of phenomena, it may be interpreted as a fast flashing light. The flicker of the TV display interferes with the vibration of the loudspeaker in this piece, affecting the visual appearance of the loudspeaker.

The combination of this kind of work with light reminded me of an exhibition I saw in London in 2019, which also had something to do with light（factory 180）. I was quite interested in this at the time and looked for artists in the country to research.

Factory 180

Panda Po Appreciation

Panda Po is the theme music of GongFu Panda. It is a very lyrical
It appears at the end of the film that the master and the disciple are
at the end of the film when the master and disciple are sharing buns under a peach tree. The music is a very lyrical piece of music.
Chinese flavor and the self-sufficiency typical of agrarian societies.
The film is full of Chinese flavor and the typical self-sufficiency of an agrarian society. The pulsating notes and lightly plucked strings
quietly transport us to that welcoming place, with the jumping rhythms of the yangqin pounding and the plucked strings of the lower register. The plucked strings immediately transport us back to the beautiful and peaceful valley of peace.

A series of lightly plucked notes and yodeling variations slowly introduce the second appearance of the main melody The main theme is reproduced with the addition of marimba, a Western percussion instrument, whose The “tinkling” sound of the marimba, like a gurgling stream of water The “tinkling” sound of the marimba, like the flow of water, is matched by the joyful flow of the yangqin, giving us a the valley of peace. At the end of each phrase, there is a sub-spin played on the yangqin with the typical Chinese folk song in the form of a reply.

In the section that follows, the composer uses Chinese opera-style small hits (hang cymbal, small gong, ringing board) and powerful drums to make this section witty and jumpy without losing its grandeur, and the lead instrument has been changed from a yangqin to a more dexterous small clapper flute, rendering this vigorous and continuous vitality very charming.

The bass of the overture is replaced by the yangqin, which plucks the strings throughout, and adds the humorous and mischievous gong from Chinese opera. In the second half of the piece, the first section is repeated, with more varied orchestration, for example, the beautiful strings replacing the yangqin and adding a contralto structure, with a fuller and more expressive mood than before, gradually bringing the piece to a climax. The piece returns to silence at the end, stopping with the initial plucking of the strings, as if you have just heard a seemingly mundane but infinitely meaningful story, and you feel as if you have not yet finished. It is worth noting that in this short score, the composer uses a melodic technique typical of traditional Chinese music – the ‘fish biting its tail’ – which is prominent in the main melody of the four phrases. The “fish bites the tail” refers to the structure in which the ending note of the previous melody is the same as the first note of the next melody, also known as the articulation and the succession, which is a form of traditional Chinese music structure. Musical language (musical language consists of many elements: melody, rhythm, meter, tempo, intensity, range, timbre, harmony, polyphony, modulation, tonality, etc.). The ideological content and artistic beauty of a piece of music can only be expressed through a variety of elements) is closely connected, with a neat and tidy syntax. This is very typical of Chinese compositional thinking, and is used in a large number of famous Chinese songs such as ‘The Moon in the Spring River’ and ‘The Night of the Flowers and the Moon’.

Rachel Simpson

Rachel Simpson is an experienced composer and sound designer living in Dundee in Scotland with over 15 years in game development. She create music and sound effects for various media including video games, television, animations and any other media in need of unique, creative audio. I’m also a performing and recording musician.

She work draws from Jazz, Classical and Pop music with a strong harmonic basis and includes a long standing collaboration with Dundee recording artist Andrew Wasylyk, performing on his 3 most recent records (including the Scottish Album of the Year nominated The ‘Paralian’).

Rachel Simpson. 2022. Rachel Simpson. [online] Available at: <http://www.rachelsimpsonsound.com> [Accessed 19 May 2022].

I could feel during Rachel Simpson’s talk that she is a very good artist. She has created music for many games. I also learnt a lot of technical aspects of her experience in creating music during her talk. I also got to see some of her sharing and advice on sound effects. Rachel Simpson in Sweetgrass AR: Exploring Augmented Reality as a Resource for Indigenous people mentioned that “AR has the ability to reveal and criticise settler colonial images while evoking relational ethics and Indigenous ways of knowing in the context of Indigenous- settler interactions. However, it also has the potential to spread disinformation and commodify Indigenous Knowledge.”
This critical thinking is also a topic that is being researched throughout week24.

I read some of the articles given by week24 starting with 5 key considerations for ethical virtual reality storytelling – Caroline Scott. in this article there are five things to look out for in vr and they are

Make a risk analysis
test your material as you go
Co-create with your audience
Get active feedback from your audience
Diversify your teams

While I agree with some of the above points, I have also looked up some other sources on this topic and I believe that there are several factors that make games ethically problematic. The first is the subjectivity of the creator of the game; VR is primarily a simulation of reality. The extent to which virtual reality is used in the gaming industry, how realistic it is, and whether there is any subjectivity on the part of the creator. To analyse these questions we need to return to the level of VR’s rendering of reality. The size, shape, colour and perspective of objects in a virtual scene are designed by the creator. Is the realism in the design of the scene, different from the reality? How does this subtle variability affect people’s understanding of how real things are? Perhaps it is not a question that people care about. But it is incumbent on the game producer to explain to people what details have been left out and what details have been designed. Obviously, game creators cannot avoid their own subjectivity permeating the production process of virtual games, and both the motives and biases of the creator will be reflected in the VR gaming process. Maintaining objectivity in VR games is a code of ethics for game creation teams and is about a clear understanding of the facts.

The second is virtual reality technology and emotional sensitivity. the strength of VR games in their ability to shape stories is significant. the high perceived focus of the game’s backstory by VR technology can lead to emotional sensitivity. People are immersed in the narrative space constructed by VR games, concentrating all their attention to highly perceive everything in the game. If the content presented in a VR game is pleasurable in nature, then this can easily contribute to people’s emotional cohesion. The potential impact of VR on people includes the potential to have an emotional impact on them. When people focus all of their attention on the virtual space, it intensifies their emotional responses to the game story content. The speed of people’s emotional reactions in virtual spaces is much greater than in real spaces. To avoid the stimulation of emotional reactions in virtual reality technology, it is necessary to manage the content of virtual reality game and follow the appropriate balance to avoid the risk of emotional generalisation.

As a sound designer the most important ethical principle I have to respect is originality. I think it’s not just sound designers but all those who work in the arts that should respect this code of ethics.

Chinese Music in Western Cinema—Lullaby

Directed by Bertolucci and written by three composers, Ryuichi Sakamoto, David Byrne and Su Cong, The Last Emperor tells the story of Pu Yi, the last emperor of the Qing Dynasty, from his accession to the throne in 1908 until the Cultural Revolution, a period of almost sixty years. The film features many Chinese folk songs and operas, such as “The East is Red”, “Lullaby” (a northeastern folk song) and the Peking Opera “An Tian Hui”. Here I will mainly analyse the film’s ‘Lullaby’（around 27‘）.

https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1p7411d7HV/

The lullaby is in the warm A-tone mode, but the music is more melancholic and intense because of the infiltration, alternation and transformation of the minor key colours such as feather and shang. The combination of this distinctive national tonal approach with the poignant images of life and death and the suppressed weeping of the voices makes for a powerful combination of sound and picture that is both sorrowful and joyful. Lullaby not only has a dominant and radiating structural effect on the music of the film’s many themes in terms of its core tones, modal techniques, spatial characteristics and narrative direction, but also metaphorically writes about Pu Yi’s life with the pain of parting from her father and baby. The film opens with a shadow-like empty shot from the perspective of a traveller, moving and moving through historical images of pavilions, eaves and pavilions, inked seals and brocades. In parallel with the above images, the core pitch patterns, spins and melodic lines in each phrase of the Main Title Theme can be found in the Lullaby, as well as the shifting trajectories revealed through the technical practice of pitch material splitting, modulation, modulation and synthesis. On the one hand, this theme music inherits the influence of the couplet structure and its tonal colours of the opera music panel, making the audiovisual combination full of elegant courtly rhythms; on the other hand, with the help of Western multi-layered compound rhythms, it breaks away from the traditional sense of metrical stability, periodicity and regularity, while highlighting the spatial layers of the royal garden in the image. The music is a unified rhythm that leads the audience into the legendary world of the protagonist’s swaying, enchanted life.

However, the music’s internal structure and external form, the multiple combinations of Western and Chinese instruments, the leading motifs and the design of the weaving patterns all reflect the dominance of Western composition. It can be said that the artistic pursuit of resemblance rather than resemblance and the aesthetic interaction between the composer and the director reflect the profound grasp of the traditional Chinese culture in the film, and also convey the aesthetic paradigm and creative interest of the integration of traditional Chinese musical elements in the Western perspective in the sound rhythm and the combination of sound and painting.

IMMERSION

Immersion is the process of full mental concentration, the development, change and transition from one state of mind to another. The reduction of the display distance from the object being displayed increases the emotional engagement with the current event. In the study of virtual reality technology, “immersion” stands for making the user feel as if he is in the episode displayed on the screen”, “the user feels as if he is a part of the virtual environment and not an observer. He feels surrounded by the virtual scene and can look to the right and left, move freely around the environment, and interact with the objects as if he were in the real world, which he has already experienced”. In the current field of research, physiological immersion refers to the use of virtual reality technology to provide the user with visual, auditory and haptic sensory perceptions in order to make the user feel present in the world constructed by the virtual reality technology, a sense of ‘presence’. The term ‘immersion’ in psychological immersion refers to the psychological satisfaction of the user during the interaction, i.e. “an experience that is suitably challenging and immerses a person so deeply that they forget the passage of time and are unaware of their own existence”.

In almost all VR scenarios, there is a virtual image of the user themselves, which initially exists as an environment in relation to the user’s real body. vr gamers perceive and recognise this through a series of activities that lead the user to a sense of self-identity. If what the player body perceives and what is inherent is unified and believable, then the user will naturally integrate into the VR. This sense of identity needs to be maintained in many ways to be achieved.

I believe that the first thing that needs to be taken into account when designing sound in VR is the proximity of the sound, or the sense of space. Hearing is one of the main ways in which people acquire information. Therefore, the study of sound is one of the more important issues to think about in terms of how to create a sense of immersion in the virtual reality process. Sound can be described using interventions on perception and through the organisation and construction of perceptions and cognition. A hierarchy of contrasting strengths and weaknesses of sound will provide the brain with a very complete spatial imagery. Therefore we should not only demand the presence of sound, but also higher requirements for sound, such as more realistic detailing; displaying sound that fits the current position of the observer and follows the line of sight; ambient sound that gets different levels of nuance, etc. Another thing that can enhance immersion is sound surround. Virtual surround sound technology uses two-channel stereo hardware to create a simulated three-dimensional sound field without increasing the number of channels or sound materials by circuitically processing the sound field signal to make the listener feel that the sound is coming from multiple directions. The sound field can be reconstructed with head rotation and movement.

Yan Jun

Yan Jun born in Lanzhou in 1973, graduated from Northwest Normal University with a degree in Chinese and now lives and works in Beijing.

Yan Jun is a multi-faceted musician who has been active in music criticism, music and art event planning, improvised music performance, and even poetry writing for many years. As a music critic, Yan Jun has written around one million words of music criticism and was one of the main promoters of underground rock in China in the 1990s; as an independent music and art event planner, Yan Jun has devoted himself to the creation and promotion of experimental music and sound art in recent years, founding the Throwing Mustard Music Studio and being the planner of the earliest music festival Mini Minidiscover in China; as a sound artist and improvising music performer, Yan Jun has created As a sound artist and improviser, Yan Jun has founded several bands such as Tie Guan Yin and the perfidious Pisces Man.

This was my favourite piece in his lecture. Here is how I felt about it after seeing it. When I first saw the video I thought it was very new, both visually and aurally. The combination of the closed lift and the highly saturated colours gave me a feeling of danger and oppression. There is a sense of distortion and the whole space feels abstract. I love the sound effect, in fact I love any artwork with vocals. The immersion and self-importance of imagining your own voice as a note played on an instrument is great.

VR GAME

I’ve played a lot of games on the switch and PC (steam), not a lot of vr games. I’ve only played less than 5 games since vr gaming technology came out, so I don’t really have much experience with them. I will however describe a few of the vr games that have impressed me the most and my most recent experience with vr games based on what I will write in the next few posts.

The first vr game that impressed me the most was ‘Beat Saber’. This was the first vr game I played and is by far my favourite vr game. It’s a musical beat game. It contains various genres of music such as hip hop and rock, and uses lightsaber swings to hit the rhythm cubes. Combined with the exquisite scene modelling and rhythm pattern changes within the game and scene changes such as bombs gave me an immediate immersive environment gaming experience. I received feedback for every move I made and the fixed point gameplay prevented me from getting motion sickness from the game. I was also pleased with the tactile aspect. When the lightsaber simulated with the joystick hit the blocks, the joystick emitted a subtle vibrating sensation and I got feedback on every move I made. I’ve actually played this game on steam (PC) without the vr version, so I was very excited when I found out it was coming to vr. As it turned out, Beat Saber’s vr game did not disappoint me, both in terms of feel and graphics and music. And because it’s a Chinese/Chinese collaboration game, ‘Beat Saber’ also has a lot of Chinese songs.

The second game I would like to talk about is ‘The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners’. It’s a bit more technically challenging than ‘Beat Saber’. I played this game because I saw a lot of people recommending it and I was interested in the zombie genre so I bought it. Personally, I think there are a lot of things that make this game shine. For example, the killing of zombies, although I personally found it a bit disgusting when I played it, I have to admit that the brains and guts of the zombies are well rendered in detail. And most importantly, the tactile feel, with each weapon having just the right amount of weight and texture. Heavy weapons such as axes and rifles require two handed grips for added stability, while smaller weapons such as hunting knives can be operated with one hand, making it easier to make precise attacks. I’ve only played the game a few times though, firstly because it’s open-ended but still revolves around a closed loop of exploration, scavenging, killing and crafting, and the main quest to find the stockpile can seem thin. The second is because the immersion that vr games bring to me, the feeling of being surrounded by loss is scary and I’m afraid to play alone.

The third is the game I recently played, ‘HITMAN 3’. I didn’t bring my vr device with me but my friend brought it and bought the game so I borrowed my friend’s stuff to play it. I played ‘HITMAN 2’ on the computer and it was really fun and it was very playable. I had high hopes for the ‘HITMAN 3’ vr game. But when I finished it I was actually a bit disappointed. It was very difficult to manoeuvre and it felt like the characters couldn’t follow my perspective. My friend told me that when she watched me play it, I felt like I was in a weird position, like I had new limbs that hadn’t been trained yet. On top of that I’ve seen a lot of negative comments about the graphics quality. I didn’t really notice this when I was playing because I’m a bit nearsighted with astigmatism so I always thought it was my eyes that were the problem. I think the biggest problem with ‘HITMAN 3’ is that it doesn’t integrate into the vr game and the overall feeling while playing is fragmented. It was very strange to have my eyes and ears in the vr game but my hands still on the keyboard.

Finally, I think the most important thing about vr games is the sense of immersion. The synchronization of picture and sound, the synchronization of picture and touch. You have to imagine all the parts as a whole to have a better gaming experience.

Chinese Melody

Among the various modes used in Chinese music, the pentatonic scale, which consists of five tones arranged in fifths – Gong, Shang, Horn, Zheng and Fe – is the most common. The pentatonic scale has a unique triad of major second and minor third, and the lack of Many Western musicians consider the use of the pentatonic scale to be a reflection of the Chinese style, due to its unique triadic grouping of major and minor seconds and the melodic flavour of the missing semitones. For example, in the unfinished Sonata in C major (D.480) by the 19th century Austrian composer Franz Schubert (1797 – 1828), the pentatonic scale appears in the thematic section of the first movement. The pentatonic scale in C (palace, quotient, horn, sign and plumage) uses a continuous triplet rhythmic pattern; in the unfolding section, Schubert shifts the piece to D plumage. The octave staccato in both hands, with several powerful chord tones in between, brings out the power and mood of the theme. Unfortunately, Schubert died of illness before the last two movements of the sonata were completed (there are some drafts of the third movement and the fourth movement has only reached the unfolding section).

Then there was the 20th century Russian-American pianist Alexander Zirpin (1899-1977). Zilpin not only organised a competition for piano works with a Chinese flavour, but also composed his own “Five Concert Etudes” (no. 52) with Chinese pentatonic scales and “Piano Exercises in Pentatonic Scale” (no.51). Zilpin uses the pentatonic scale as the basis for his melodies, incorporating Chinese folk songs, such as “Purple Bamboo Tune” and “The Pretty Lady”, in his compositions, so that Chinese folk music and Western music can be blended together, presenting a more complete picture than the traditional Western harmonic termination. The melodies in this piece are a blend of Chinese folk music and Western music, giving it a completely different acoustic colour than the traditional Western harmonic termination. In another of his works, Seven Songs – A Score of Chinese Poetry, he combines the rhythm of Chinese poetry with the pentatonic scale, using the technique of the rotary palette of Chinese folk music and the two-two-three structure of Chinese poetic chanting to create a work with a strong Chinese musical flavour. The mood of this work is like that of Chinese poetry, where the rhythm of silence is better than sound.

Fair Bradley

Fair Bradley

Bradley (b. Iran) is an artist engaging with listening, language and the environment. Her research-based practice spans the mediums of performance, broadcast, installation and sculpture. Core methodologies revolve around experimentalism, deep listening and exercises in modes of communication and reception.

Bradley’s works employ treated found objects, textiles and electronics. Her live performances stage interplays between architecture, public space and history, provoking and repositioning the listener, questioning our sense of self and our place within both society and nature.

Faribradley.co.uk. 2022. About – Fari Bradley. [online] Available at: <https://www.faribradley.co.uk/about> .

No Shadows in Paradise, 2017 – Neon tubing, plexiglass, electrics. 70x120cm

No Shadows in Paradise, 2017 – Neon tubing, plexiglass backboard, electric cabling. 70x120cm

This was one of my favourite pieces from the lecture. First of all, the music was very appealing and interesting to me. The music is different for the left and right channels. The electric light makes the whole piece look interesting.