Australian Maritime Museum Commission

Hendrixing it out in the name of mateship (mate-ship)

The storyworld and MOD’s design for the galley is to show the camaraderie that is so often described by the crew over the decades that HMAS Vampire was in service.

Good old Aussie mateship on Vampire over the years

I’ve decided to take a double approach to achieving this in sound. In the MOD specification, they suggest the kinds of sounds that would have been around the galley – laughter, shouting, chatting – but my brief is to abstract didactic sounds everywhere. So my plan is to head into a bar, find some boisterous Aussie-accented blokes to record, and then to make those samples sound like distorted memories – long ago, swirling around the space, but also still recognisable as voices. I captured some speaking on the internet today to mock this up with (I’m not going to tell you where it’s from, but if you recognise it you’ll see I was being very cheeky), and was pretty happy with the results…

The second part of the double approach is to return to the playlist, or at least the concept of having a playlist from the time that the vessels were in service, and to write a piece that mimics the rock-funk of Jimi Henrix, but in this case for Ensemble Offspring, adding to the abstracted and even surreal nature of the sound. I’ve made a few sketches and I’ll complete a digital draft to share soon.

White noise for waves and sickness

The final piece that I’d like to record on the vessels themselves is the piece for the Sick Bay, which I’m calling Waves (MOD have this fabulous visual idea of projecting moving light like waves around the sick bay … sea sickness …). I wanted to create an abstracted “sea sound” (i.e. not an obvious cheesey sea sample complete with seagull cries) to underpin this, and it was a remarkably easy thing to do in Ableton Live following on from the sound design course at Liveschool.

Over this will be more experimentation with dissonant extended techniques on the bass clarinet and bass flute, plus another wheel-bells part – but this time 6 wheels for one player. And, of course, the waterphone again, meaning that this sound opened and closed the tour through Vampire. Altogether, it should be quite eerie and sick-making…

Officer’s room – second secrets

As I mentioned a few days ago, I’ve planned the Navigator and Officer’s rooms sound to work together when they bleed. The narrative for both is one of mystery and secrecy, so the mood is consistent, and I’ve balanced them sonically by using low, slow sounds with unpitched percussive metallics in the Navigator’s room and, today, by creating a texture using higher sounds and pitched percussion in the Officer’s room… here’s a mock-up:

The musical material in this space may remind you of the 2s against 3s from hmas voyager : in memoriam that I shared in July, but actually the inspiration again is from Howard Skempton, and in particular his work Surface Tension. There’s a fantastic recording of this piece on Mode Record, but I’ve also made my own MIDI recording so you can hear it:

The influence, as you’ve probably guessed, is not in the piano figure, but in the simple melodic writing in octaves – in my case, the flute and clarinet rather than flute and cello. I can remember when I first heard it thinking that the flute and cello, with the flute low in range and the cello in mid-range, made a new sound, not a summed sound, when they played such simple material in octaves. Typical Skempton, to find such beauty and originality in simplicity…

P.S. Wasted most of yesterday trying to find a good sample of rolled vibraphone. In the end purchased the full Vienna vibraphone, so appreciate how amazingly realistic it is in the above video!

Here’s what to hit in the gun bay, specifically

I’ve spent the last two days taking the morse code rhythms generated thus far, and some more (around the names of the vessels), and thinking about how I could re-use those rhythms and develop them (like a series of variations) using the sounds Claire and Bree discovered in their workshopping in the actual gun bay. I’ve not only extended the score, but I’ve created a “map” of the gun bay in three parts, so that the performers can move around it, in a circle, playing in concert, just as the original operators would have worked together. It looks like this…

The three colours on the floor plan indicate the three areas in the circular gun bay that the players will move around.

Each section has a more detailed page with photographs and diagrams showing exactly what each object mentioned in the score is, and where it is found.

The score is based on the established morse code rhythms from the names of the vessels, including subtle rhythmic development and variation.

Bree referred to the white capsules shown here as “100% asbestos” in the workshop when she played on them. They sound amazing, sort of like deadened claves. So that’s what I called them in the score.

Workshop with Bree and Claire

I finally got the amazing percussionists Bree Van Reyk and Claire Edwardes on board the HMAS Vampire destroyer to see what kinds of sounds we could make, but also to find out more about the typical kind of sounds that would have been made on a daily basis with the incredibly helpful staff and volunteers of the ANMM.

In this video, filmed and edited by Jessica Lawless, you can see experiments first in a gun turret, then the engine room, and then the steam room. The latter two are not currently open to the public, so it was pretty exciting to get inside them and look around.

I had been thinking that if we found amazing sounds my choice would be to go back into the ship and sample them, for recording at the Sydney Conservatorium’s studios later in the year, or to use traditional percussion instruments and other readily-available sound sources to imitate them in the studio.

But Bree and Claire both thought that we really should get back into those spaces to record. We’d have to do this in the evening (so it’s not too noisy), but Hamish thinks that we can do it. So my job now is to review about an hour of footage and choose the sounds I’m keen to use and the spaces they’ll take place in. Exciting stuff. I also need to work out how all of this will fit together in the final piece, which on top of the other changes to the project recently means I need to get back to a structural plan… another blog soon…

Down to the technical stuff with Jarrad

Today I visited the museum again with Jarrad Salmon, audio engineer supreme from the Sydney Conservatorium to consider whether we can use the audio gear that is already installed on the vessels, or not.

Jarrad’s involvement on the project is important because while I’ve been refreshing my sound design skills recently, sound designed in my studio and recorded at the Conservatorium will still need to be mixed and mastered not just for the space where it will be played back but also for the equipment it will be played back on. That’s the kind of expertise Jarrad has.

We discovered that the equipment that’s on the vessels won’t support the kind of immersive, emotive, surround audio that I’m imagining, so we’ll now need to look at what the ideal equipment would be, and compare that with budget, striking a midway point hopefully!

Creative brainstorming day for Vampire at ANMM.

Yesterday I spent the day at the Australian National Maritime Museum with a creative team charged with finalising content under the umbrella term of “Magic Realism” for the Vampire exhibition. It was the first time I got to work with story writers, architects and designers on this project, so it was fun to hear ideas coming to light. I presented my ideas for sound so far to the group, and all of the ideas they had during the day fitted with the kinds of things I was thinking of or spurred me on to think of new things or existing ideas more deeply. More to come on themes of the day soon.

What I learned at school today

Today’s class at LiveSchool focused on synthesising drum sounds close to those found on Roland’s classic 808 drum machine (the inspiration for many sounds still found in electronic popular music today). While it might seem that this would be a little more useful for the “doof” composers in the room, it’s actually very useful for me to consider how I might go about creating industrial sounds myself, or (more likely) making sounds that fill the acoustic space between actual industrial sounds and the sounds of western historical instruments…

My first day at school

“DJ Sasha at Arenele Romane, Bucharest (2006)”. The original uploader was Wickethewok at English Wikipedia – Taken on 8 July at Arenele Romane in Bucharest, Romania by Barbu Cristian. Courtesy of Red Light Management. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons.

The LiveSchool course tonight taught me two important things. First, that my theoretical understanding of electronic sound synthesis is still pretty up to date (just swap out circuits and knobs for digital emulation and a mouse and all of the same theory still applies), and second that LiveSchool courses are AMAZING and I’m going to learn heaps about Ableton Live, and I’m certain I’ll supplement my existing knowledge about sound design with lots more. The interesting thing is that I’m probably the only “art music” person in the room, with the 7 others writing various genres of popular electronic music, yet the information is useful to us all.

My one takeaway from the night was Adam Maggs’ brilliant demonstration with the Operator instrument of how adding overtones to a fundamental pitch affects the way we perceive the tone of the sound. He began with a fundamental sine wave, and added some overtones – at this point you perceive what he’s doing as a chord – but then he played a short lick with that sound on a MIDI keyboard, and instead of hearing a series of parallel chords, you hear just the fundamental tone, but with all of those overtones having changed the timbre of the pitch. Of course, this wasn’t new theory to me – but I’d never seen it explained so simply and brilliantly. So I came home and captured the process so I could post it here. I actually do it three times, picking different overtones each time, so you can really try and challenge your perception of sound.

Announcing a title for the ‘art’ work…

I noticed this sign when I was in the submarine with Jarrad and Hamish this week. The bit I love isn’t “Noise warning” but the term “Noise Husbandry”. A matter of life and death for those working on a submarine, and a perfect description of what a composer does for a living. I’m thinking that if I create a “concert” version of this work, or produce a potted recording (since the actual soundtrack will have to go for hours and hours), Noise Husbandry would be a beautiful title for such an art work – and perhaps for this ongoing project as ideas are bounced around…