Written justification

Ellie Langton

Written justification-Soundscapes

A soundscape is a sound or combination of sounds that forms or comes from an immersive environment. The study of soundscape is the subject of acoustic ecology. The idea of soundscape refers to both the natural acoustic environment, consisting of natural sounds, including animal communications, the sounds of weather and other natural elements; and environmental sounds created by humans, through musical composition, sound design, and other ordinary human activities including conversation, work, and sounds of mechanical sources resulting from use of industrial technology. The integration of these acoustic environments results in noise pollution. In this task we were asked to create a 3 minuet soundscape by taking inspiration from our day at the Liverpool Albert Dock, to gain this stimulus we looked around the Liverpool museum on the docks and tried to increase our knowledge on both of these, while examining the different parts of the museum there were a lot of ideas which would help in the making of our soundscape, for example the idea of war, and the albert docks in ww1 and ww1, or the dark side of Liverpool that nobody ever talks about, which was they’re huge involvement with the slave trade, however me and my group came to the conclusion that this was to cliché and to many groups had similar ideas. We were given the motif that our soundscape had to be ‘from the past until now’ as when it would be played, it had to be from a ‘by-gone’ time. We toyed with the idea of gang violence and crime, but we thought to source sounds like these it would be too easy, and stereotypical, and we wanted to challenge ourselves. As well as taking time to look around the museum, we were allowed to spend time walking around the docks to help us with how to create the atmosphere and also to source sounds. Our initial idea was to produce a soundscape based on music from the 60s until now; therefore we could have incorporated history on The Beatles and other famous bands from Liverpool, but we then realised that by doing this it wouldn’t have the typical characteristics of a soundscape and would no longer fit the criteria of our task, which was for it to use both naturalistic and environmental sounds. While walking around the docks, my group still hadn’t found a specific idea, so I decided to search the history of the Albert Docks on my phone, when doing this we came across an intriguing idea about the cathedrals in Liverpool City Centre and the fact the reason they were built was due to the money the docks brought in as a shipping port, we thought this could be an individual idea that could be manipulated to use naturalistic and environmental sounds for example we could have used the sound of kicking metal bins as the chime of the bells in a cathedral, or the sounds of the waves at the docks which could signify the purity of our motif which was religion, or the use of holy water.

Ellie Langton

My first screen shot is of our underlying sound which I frequently on loop throughout the whole piece, this is the sound of Gregorian monks which we sourced from websites on the internet, we decided it would be best to manipulate this sound by lowering the volume, as if it was too loud it would drown out the other layers of sounds in the piece, we chose these chants as they are stereotypical of our chosen genre of religion, we did this by selecting effect , then amplify and adjusted it until we were all happy with the specific volume we chose.

This second screen shot is of two different sounds purposely manipulated to blend into each other, the first one being flowing water in a cave, this fits into our soundscape as water is a big part of the church both showing purity and the use of holy water but also linking back to the idea of the albert docks involvement with the cathedrals, we decided to use flowing water from a cave as we wanted there to be an echo reverb which you would get in a cave. The second sound is the noise of church bells and the tweeting of birds which gives it a more everyday naturalistic effect as this is what we also wanted (to make you feel as though you are living and experiencing the sound scape). We manipulated this sound to have a louder volume, to incorporate again the everyday sound of ringing bells from a church as they are of a very loud volume, we then also faded this sound out in order for it to have a slow decay similar to the noise of church bells themselves.

Choose which piece of sound you would like to fadeout, you do this by highlighting

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Ellie Langton

I used both reverse and reverb within my soundscape, on the sound of a gong or a large bell as these are stereotypically used with in any religion, we did this by highlighting and deleting away the first half of the clip and then copy and pasting the second half, and then reversing it, which lead it to have a fast attack, long sustain and a fast decay, which created tension within our piece, to this particular sound we added reverb, which in consequence caused the piece to have an echo, this is what we wanted because cathedrals usually a dense large space which would cause it to sound like this.

First highlight the bit you would like to edit

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Ellie Langton

These two clips are the same as each other but have both been manipulated in order to create significant differences within the soundscape itself, they are both still the religious ‘gongs/bells’ from previous however me and my group edited them in order for the second time around the clip to have a louder volume, which would highlight the idea of repetitiveness, this is then also in unison with the repetitiveness of the monks which create the structure of the soundscape, we also layered each sound under each other so the listener experiences them at the exact same time in order to produce the continuous repetitiveness.

Highlight the piece in which you wish to manipulate

I feel as though the making of this soundscape went better as we progressed through the weeks, but overall I think it was a very successful development. If I was to repeat this again I would probably take more time to plan out my idea better, and structure it more throughout the piece. But generally I think our soundscape met the requirements of it needing to sound naturalistic and environmental from a by-gone time.

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