As discussed in previous posts I will score a scene of a short film created by a director friend of mine. In this project I will use code as my main compositional tool, creating desired textures through genereative made music. In a short sum up of what happens in the first scene, the main character is walking through London to get to his job and then back home. The movie deals with the theme of isolation inside a big city and the social alienation that can occur because of it. The scene starts with a long shot of the main character walking through a wide street to get to his office. The shot is designed to seem as an optical illusion creating an endless pathway from the character to its destiny. For this first scene I composed an ambient generative piece called Aether using Supercollider.

Aether works as a medium to convey the theme of dreams and reality, creating a trance inducing feeling. I was inspired to take this approach from David Toop’s book Ocean of Sound that I have discussed in a previous post. I used different techniques to create this aesthetic, first of all and already mentioned I used generative practices to create the music. The hypnotic static nature of generative music helps convey a feeling of floating, creating an additive value to the optical illusion of the walk. The second technique I used to achieve the aesthetic is using the pelog scale, characteristic of Gamelan music. I’ve been recently obsessed with it and it is also mentioned in Ocean of Sound, because of its spiritual use and its implications inside the ambient canon.

Above is a draft recording of Aether. Heavy compression have been used with the same objective of creating the static aesthetic, limiting drastic dynamic changes through out the composition. Compression also helped to regulate levels of each individual synth voice, I have found adjusting volumes in Supercollider quite hard, making it hard to create a decent mix.

The picture above is a small snap of my script when composing Aether. I mainly used SynthDef’s and Pdef’s to create and sequence my sounds, this gave my the opportunity to create multiple synth voices that added texture and harmony to the piece. I also experimented using filters, both inside my oscillator and as an external effect. I found out the MoogFF.ar filter that is an emulation of the Moog ladder filter, it has a great sound and I used it through the piece. To further develop the use of filters I also added random numbers to decide the cutoff frequency of the filter, adding a more complex generative technique. The script uses extensive randomness parameters that are the main tool to create the generative nature of it. I modulated mainly patterns, from the steps used to the output sent, this was useful to play with panning and make the piece more interesting.

Aether will be used only in the walking scenes before the character gets inside of the underground. The music will be mixed very quietly in the overall soundtrack of the scene, so both the music and the atmosphere field recordings can be heard. This has the purpose of using aether as just a tonal colouring technique, hinting a melancholic emotion to the listener perceived mostly by the subconscious. For the next scene I will use another piece of music also created in Supercollider, but it will have a more aggressive aesthetic that will contrast the sound and music of the first scene for a narrative development purpose.