SPATIAL & INTERACTIVE AUDIO - JOURNAL
Entry 1 – Motivation & Rationale
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I have decided that I would like to create a sound only piece for my Spatial and Interactive Audio submission. My idea is to recreate the sonic landscape of an outdoor commercial music festival. My motivation for creating this piece are based around the fact that 2020 is the first year since 2007 that I have not attended a music festival due to COVID-19 restrictions and lockdown measures. I was supposed to attend two of my favourite festivals: SXSW in Austin, Texas and Primavera Sound in Barcelona, Spain in the spring and summer of 2020 but these were obviously cancelled in light of the aforementioned restrictions.
Attending music festivals is one of my favourite hobbies and in the past it has even extended to somewhat of a job as my old band were able to play at festivals across the world. The atmosphere I want to capture in my piece is the varied, dynamic sonic landscape of being in a field with other festival goers and walking around the arena site, visiting different stages with different genres of artists performing.
There have been many amazing releases and live-stream events in lieu of festivals in 2020 which have certainly provided some sort of cathartic substitution. However, I am much more interested in capturing the sonic experience as an audience member as a whole rather than just watching an artist perform. It is the energetic, busy and eclectic mix of sounds and atmospheres that I am looking to re-create. I will use spatial audio tools to place the listener in the middle of the music festival and use binaural audio, EQ and volume to achieve a realistic re-creation.
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Entry 2 – Research, Accumulating Audio & Setting the Scene
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One of the most time consuming parts of this project is accumulating recordings and audio files suitable for use in my session. With a bit of research, I was able to find out how I can export the audio from live YouTube videos of festival performances. I decided it would be a good idea to have an eclectic mix of genres and so I found footage from performances by some of my favourite artists: King Krule, Marika Hackman, Denis Sulta and Earl Sweatshirt. This enabled me to recreate the layout of a standard commercial music festival covering Alternative Indie, Upcoming artists, Dance and Rap/Hip-Hop. At this stage I already knew that these sounds alone wouldn’t be enough. In order to properly recreate the festival experience I would have to find other recordings. I used YouTube, Freesound and Soundsnap to source various sounds such as crowd noise, individual chatter, walking through grass and mud and other appropriate audio.
Upon starting my session, I created tracks for each artist and used the Room Encoder plug-in to spatialise each ‘stage’, much like a music festival would do in order to separate the sound from each area/artist. I was able to synchronise every track to emulate the feeling of these stages being in the same room, and with reverb reflections turned off it already began to sound like each sound source was outside rather than actually in a room. With my session already taking shape, I decided to take a short break to properly plan out how, where and when the listener would experience each stage and the other goings-on effectively. I drew out a diagram of which direction the listener would move and listened carefully to each piece of audio to pick which should be most prominent and when they would occur in the mix.
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Entry 3 – The Bulk of the Work
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With thanks to Ronan for his knowledge and experimentation using Reaper, I was able to automate the listener position in the Room Encoder plug-in. This meant that I could effectively move the listener between stages according to my diagram. I had a few minor issues when trying this to start with but after a few test runs I was happy with how it was sounding. I made sure each track was placed exactly where I wanted it on the timeline and I had to copy and paste a few sections of audio. I then recorded the automation of the listener position in real time, focussing on each stage for around 2 minutes. This was a conscious decision as I wanted to emulate both the experience of walking towards each stage and the experience of being in front of the stage for a short period watching the artist. In between each stage I placed my other audio files such as crowd noises and walking noises to make the experience sound more authentic and textured. I was very pleased how my session was taking shape and I felt that it was around 65% complete. However, I also felt that it sounded a little bit un-natural as each audio clip had very similar EQ and volume levels. I then automated the volume of each and every track to try and emulate the interaural time and intensity difference encountered when walking towards or away from a sound source. After doing this with each track I felt that it was becoming a lot more natural sounding. I then added and automated EQ on almost every track which again helped with the localisation of sounds. With boosting the low kHz of the dance tent and lowering the high kHz I was able to give the impression that the dance tent is in the distance. I could then use this same principle to enhance the emulation of walking into a dance tent and the sound becoming much clearer with more high end definition.
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Entry 4 – Minor Adjustments & Finalising the Session
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After spending some time apart from my session, I revisited it to make sure that I was happy with everything. One of the main things I noticed was that the last 30 seconds or so sounded a little bit unnatural. This was due to each stage being at a different level with neither at the forefront. I decided to add another audio clip of a crowd gathered at an outdoor market which helped to give the impression of a food court area within a music festival. This, coupled with further EQ’ing and volume control of the stages and other sounds, I feel, gave a good impression of the listener winding down into a seated area. I also noticed that at various points in my session there was a little bit of clipping. I had to manually adjust the volume of certain tracks to ensure this would no longer be the case without compromising the dynamic range of the session.
I feel overall that my project has been a success. I struggled a little bit with using Reaper to start with, but after a good bit of practice I began to feel confident using different tools and plug-in’s such as EQ, Room Encoder and Volume to convincingly paint a sonic picture of a mainstream music festival. I especially think that the short audio clips of crowd noise, talking and walking were paramount in making the project sound legitimate when listening on headphones. It has been a cathartic experience to re-visit and try to piece together the atmosphere and soundscape of a music festival in lieu of being able to attend the real events and I have thoroughly enjoyed the process from start to finish.