After an intense travel to NYC I finally arrived to the program! Now I’ve had the opportunity to meet my peers and professors, it has been an incredible experience ever since! Hypercinema class was the first class for me to collaborate with some of my teammates, Michael and William. Definitively learned so much about them and was a very enriching experience to get our hands into building a soundscape with them.
As a sound designer, I took this assignment as any other of the projects I’ve worked on before, I had to sound the best possible. Our idea was a challenging one, to portrait the concept of a robot dreaming about its own paradise-like environment, where every sound may have a mechanical touch, but also with this deep desire of understanding natural aspects of life like a conversation or animals. Each of us brought distinctive sounds to the table to play with.
The landscape we were trying to convey was this dark, distopic and cold world. These were our visual inspirations.
Most of these sounds were used in some way during our sound vacation piece. Some of them as background sounds that would build the world the story is set. This paradisiac place for a robot within its dream, came to life by using these metal and mechanic sounds. We assembled a sound design set up using an audio interface, headphones and my computer with ProTools to create a session with the sounds and began experimenting with them by cutting them and processing them in some way. We also looked for a couple of sounds on free sound or in my sound design library of sounds.
The sound of the robot communications was done by the guitar strings scratching with a whammy bar. The ‘Announcer robot’ used that sound without any other process aside from the volume, verb and panning automations for creating perspective and movement around the world. The ‘Principal Robot’ was that same sound but pitched, robotisized and distorted with the Sountoys’ Little AlterBoy plugin. There’s a static sound in the piece that was recorded by creating that static with my iPhone put up close to my guitar pickups. Aside from this, each robot had a different form of movement, the ‘announcer’ was made by cutting servo sounds. The ‘principal’ robot’s steps were made by combining two sounds, metal resonant steps and sand steps. Each sound samples were embedded into a Kontakt instrument for us to be able to perform each step to the rhythm we wanted.
Finally, after placing all the edited sounds, we had a good round of mixing to finalize any details and for a well rounded performance. I added some EQ and compression to the sounds and the Master Auxiliaries to control the peaks and deliver in good loudness specifications.
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