While conceptualising the sound for The Alphabet, the most important part for me was sonically creating a child’s nightmare. I thought scavenging charity shops for children’s toys and instruments would be an interesting way to create that sound. I walked through some charity shops in Woolworth after a university lecture, unsure what exactly I was looking for. The final shop I went into was stocked full of children’s toys that spoke or played songs. What caught my eye were two cassette tapes of children’s nursery rhymes. They were priced at 50p each and I bought them and started thinking about how these could be used.
During the first scene of The Alphabet, there is a collage of letters, coloured polka dots and nature imagery. This is the only scene in the film that visually doesn’t look like it’s in a horror film. I thought this would be a perfect opportunity to use my cassette player.
One of the cassettes was broken but one was fully intact. The cassette featured nursery rhyme classics like ‘London Bridge Is Falling Down’, ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’, and ‘My Fair Lady’, the latter being the song sampled for the piece.
I recorded the tapes onto Ableton and started experimenting with the tapes by using the tape machine as an instrument. My tape machine has a pause machine which if you hold it down slightly will manipulate the tape and speed up the song. You can hear what that sounds like unedited here.
I was left with this recording and thought “How could I make this scary?”. I transposed down the track, which starts creating an eerie atmosphere. I used a plugin called Backmask which can reverse your audio and cut between reversed and non-reversed audio, which gives the track an abrupt, complex texture and sound that really enhanced the track. I also used MISHBY which is a broken tape machine plugin that specialises in distortion, detuning, and warping tracks. This gave the track a bit more edge by using distortion on the track. You can hear the final edit of this here
During the end credits of The Alphabet you can hear more tape manipulation, I resampled the track you here earlier in the films and transposed it down to make it even more warped and dark. I thought this would be an interesting motif to use as the tape manipulation is one of the first sounds you hear and the final one you hear.