#experimentalaudio

“The Rivers Dream of Rain" is the seventh chapter of a project called "In A Walled City"

This project - a guide to coming phases of human existence - is nonlinear, fragmented and exists within a dream state - so you may enter at any point including this one.

You can subscribe or stream this episode - and all previous episodes - for free on all major podcast sites including libsyn, stitcher, spotify, apple, and so on. on my Bandcamp page (https://disparition.bandcamp.com/) a high quality download of each episode is available for sale, which is a good way to support the project if you like what I'm doing

Stitcher: www.stitcher.com/podcast/in-a-walled-city

Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/in-a-walled-city/id1526192366

Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/18ZkP5CrZBaS0CZ74bkyYZ

Libsyn: awalledcity.libsyn.com

I will make a separate post with a transcript. 

Thank you for listening

So I've finally decided upon my plan;

Bedroom

Tv on in background panned to left or right to create a sense of space. White noise/ high pitched noise to create silence in the piece, so when that goes off it almost seems completely dead in sound. Guy suddenly snaps into a lift which takes him up into a propellor plane

Plane

The plane engines suddenly blow and a mayday call is sounded creating tension as to what is happening next. Guy gets back in lift which takes him to a church 

Church 

The church is large and spacious so the sounds I record in the hall will be perfect. Guy hears singing and footsteps around him making the listener feel cautious and uneased. Running towards him. Gets back into lift after hearing banging. This take him to an office.

Office

Radio on, typing away, walks down middle of office and all starts going a little strange, beginning to awaken from dream. He snaps back into the lift and the doors open and he falls out through the air screaming until bang! back in his bed. 

Recording sounds for a church scene was interesting. I wanted to capture the reverb without artificially creating it so a real old church would be ideal. Before emailing or calling places I was walking out of the park campus studio at around 10.30pm with Will and I thought the front reception had the perfect sound for what I wanted! It was very big, very reverberant, flat reflective walls, no carpet and Tall so the sound travelled for a good 4-5 seconds before it disappeared

Footsteps. I placed the Zoom recorder on the floor and recorded a few times me running towards it so the ‘listener’ would feel as though they are being chased. Also I recorded a few footsteps. 

‘Monk-like singing’. I got will to stand in different parts of the room/hall/reception singing in a low register vocal. It sounded mad!! He also has a very bassy vocal which worked incredibly well for what I wanted.

Today I heard a propellor plane go over head whilst sat in my room and did not have anything handy to record it with. However, It did influence me to have a section in my work where the lift takes this guy up into a plane (like a dream making no sense) which he then navigates around and then it starts to crash so he gets back in the lift. This would hopefully be a pretty hectic scene!! 

Interesting one here. 

So we were recording with the binaural microphone in class a week or two ago, around different areas of the campus and we happened to be next to a lift and then captured the sound of it opening and people walking out which gave me the idea of; 

LIFTS; instead of the guy in this dream walking through doors, he is taken everywhere by lift and has no idea what is coming next. I just need to properly record a lift sound and all its noises and functions. We also recorded in a lecture hall in and captured the sound of typing and people walking past talking which sounded like a small office (hence my influence to have an office location). I was a little weary on recording an actual office so instead I had keyboard typing samples and duplicated these in numerous ways and panned them using logic’s binaural pan function to make it sound like a real office. 

Firstly I learnt the word Anthraphonies today. It means the actions/movements of artificial objects e.g. machinery, bells, cars. I will be needing a lot of these for my locations in this dream idea. 

00:00-01:00 = Guy falls asleep in his bed in his room, then wakes in his dream and gets out the bed after hearing very strange and odd sounds, he opens the door and finds himself in a factory. 

01:00-02:00 = Guy walks through factory with movement going past his ears (use binaural mic for this effect). Finds himself being chased and runs through the door at the end of the factory. You hear banging on the door behind him. 

02:00-03:00 = Guy finds himself in a church. Using Big reverb here to replicate the sound if I do not find access to a church to record in. Hears monk like singing and footsteps going past him and around him. In dreams you can hear your alarm going off sometimes and then you wake up to turn it off. I also had an awful nightmare when I was younger that someone was blow torching my feet and then I woke up with my feet on a scalding hot radiator haha. (makes sense to me) so In the background every now and then I'm thinking of having the TV on which leeks into the dream at different points. He runs to the next door and goes through. 

03:00-04:00 = Guy is in an office, he can hear everyone typing and the radio playing, he begins to become disorientated as he is slowly waking up and the music becomes disorientated to follow his mind. Im thinking of maybe having a ticking clock in the background, sped up, to replicate how time in your dream is not relative to time in your sleep. The guy then falls out the building (replicating falling or falling off a curb in your dreams) and wakes up from the dream with the tv on as he left it.