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Screaming!

'Screaming!'

Tools used: Pro Tools, SPEAR (spectral resynthesis), Soundhack, Zoom H4N

This piece was composed for the final assignment of an 'Electroacoustic Music' class I took during university, which aimed to introduce the computer-aided sound design and composition techniques of European composers who worked at IRCAM etc. We were required to use field recorders to gather sounds, and to create our pieces entirely through processing those sounds.

Unfortunately I found this quite hard, and my teacher would routinely tell me the field recordings I gathered were 'routine' or 'cliche'. Feeling frustrated, I jokingly asked a classmate to scream into my Zoom H4N field recorder after class. It was good for stress relief, but I soon realized that the sound had interesting tonal qualities, a characteristic envelope, and carried connotations that made it interesting source material.

All of the sounds in this entire piece were created by processing those two recordings of screams, each about a second long. I spent about 10 hours making various versions of the sound using spectral processing tools - time-stretching and lengthening and shortening; changing the pitch envelope; changing the formants, sometimes cutting out individual partials from the spectrogram using SPEAR, or shifting entire portions of the sound throughout the pitch domain. I also used Soundhack to convolve the edited sounds against each other, which revealed interesting sub-rhythms created by the pitch patterns in the original sound material.

Finally, I arranged the sounds in Pro Tools as though tape editing, trying to follow a structure I had sketched of continually building and shocking the listener, varying the amplitude enevelope between continuous and abrupt sound.

In the end, the piece was played during a small concert at the Sydney Opera House, over stereo speakers. It was the only electroacoustic piece in the concert, and having no performers on stage forced the audience to engage fully with the audio. Reactions varied; some people were scared, others were thrilled, some were amused. One person said the bass frequencies made their hearing aid malfunction.

I learned a great deal from making this piece, and I still receive compliments on it. I learned how even a single sound can contain enough material to form an entire piece, and how to take a sound that has inherent 'meaning' and change it enough to create a different meaning to the sound, but I also learned how to structure abstract sound to create musical events, and to structure those in entertaining ways without having to rely on traditional harmonic or melodic content.