Creative process – audio 2

Compared to the rainy section, which changes every minute, the first ten minutes are less interesting. So this time, I made the weather change a little more frequently in the first ten minutes, about every two to three minutes. I also added more sound elements this time, such as frogs, children playing in the courtyard, dogs barking, bugs barking, cows barking and hawks calling. To make these sounds appear more randomly in different directions, I rented the school composition studio this morning to use the Grm Space plugin.

In the afternoon, I went to Jiachen’s house to work with her on the sound of the middle section. We first exchanged information and reference videos that we had searched for over the past few days, and then discussed and decided on a general direction. One girl with a hearing impairment said that she could hear the sound differently in both ears, the left ear could only hear the middle part of the piano and anything beyond that sounded dull, but the right ear could hear all parts of the piano. So we decided to separate the left and right channels. One girl said that when she first wore the cochlear implant, she really wasn’t able to hear clearly. But as her brain slowly adapted, the sounds she heard gradually became less and less electronic, and more and more clear and accurate. We therefore decided to start the rain at the tenth minute as a node and to treat the first half and the second half separately. Another girl said that when she first started using the cochlear implant it was difficult to distinguish the tones, the tones of music, the tones of speech. Take do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti, where we hear seven tones, they hear one or two.

The first ten minutes are what a cochlear implant wearer hears when she is first exposed to the sound world, then it rains and she slowly starts to adapt to the sound world and she gradually hears the original sounds of the world. This is a world where nature and electronics merge, with my audio in the left channel and Jiachen’s audio in the right channel. The two voices slowly spread from their own direction to the other over a period of ten minutes, and then finally the two voices merge together. For the first ten minutes we tried using a number of plug-ins, adjusting the EQ, adding delays, adding electronic sound, reducing the sound quality of the audio to a lossy one and so on, to get the effect we wanted. After the rain, both audio would slowly become clear.

Jiachen composed three pieces of music for this part, we only used two because that one sounded quite uncomfortable with the various plug-ins.

Here are two questions we have discussed at length. Why should rain be used as a node of sound change? Should the sound of rain add the effect of cochlear implants? Rain is a very important element. One of the twenty-four Chinese solar terms is called Grain Rain. It is the last festival of spring, and it means “the rain produces all kinds of grains”. In traditional Chinese culture, rain is the source of all things, as it nourishes everything. A sense of rebirth and new life. And the image I had in my mind at the time was a girl walking into the rain, lifting her hand and catching a drop of rain, and in an instant her grey world turned into colour. Rain is accessible and catchable. It’s not really useful to talk about all that, it’s the audio that sounds comfortable and feels good at the end that counts.

Reference videos: (the comments under these videos also give us ideas)