Very early on in this project and once I decided what I wanted to create the sound for I made a demo project, where I could experiment with different sounds and concepts to see what works and what does not.
The idea of a demo for me is to have a space to experiment with multiple ideas. I think this is a very important thing to do, especially before starting a long project like this unit.
Before starting the demo I knew I wanted to experiment with drones, creating low and brooding drones has been a part of this process since day one. I also experimented with some foley recordings, at the 01:40:00 mark you can hear a scraping sound panned to the right. This is a recording of me scraping my student i.d. on the metal grates near the sound arts rooms. This was recorded with a zoom H5 recorder, pitched up and left warped. Ableton’s warp feature lets you time-stretch audio to the tempo of the project, I like to personally use it as a way to glitch and make your track trip up over itself.
Looking back on the demo from writing this (this was written after I mixed in 5.1 surround) it is not good, but clearly has ideas such as drones and vocal manipulation that continue into the final mix of The Alphabet. I think having a demo project where you can make as many mistakes as you want and experiment as much as you want before creating your proper session is very beneficial for me.
I’ve decided for this project to analyse films that are about dreams, dreamlike, or follow a child’s point of view. This will be good for my analysation skills for understanding the effects of film on people and how the sound in that film can also affect the viewer.
What films?
I’ve chosen 2 films to analyse
The Wizard Of Oz – (1939)
Mulholland Drive – David Lynch (2001)
The first film I chose was the Wizard Of Oz, which is a classic example of a dreamlike movie. It also comes from a child’s perspective which is very important for me to analyse. Also given the film’s age a lot of the effects and the overall look makes the whole film feel more dreamlike. I think this is a crucial film to talk about when discussing dreamlike films.
The second film I chose was Mulholland Drive, since I am already working on The Alphabet which was created by Lynch, I thought it would be good to revisit some of his filmography. I re-watched a compilation of his short films, Eraserhead, and Mulholland Drive. Mulholland Drive I found to be a very interesting analysation of both dreams, people, and the film industry. Analysing this film will be good for both my analysis skills and this project.
You can find my analysis of both these films in my blog titled ‘Dreamlike Film Analysis’.
Blauvelt, C. (2020). David Lynch Has Always Understood That Sound Is Key to Immersion. [online] IndieWire. Available at: https://www.indiewire.com/influencers/twin-peaks-director-david-lynch/.
The Paris Review (2014). David Lynch on Alan Splet. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSkyGRyUIEM
Hood, B. (2018). David Lynch knows he’s not the best dad. [online] Page Six. Available at: https://pagesix.com/2018/06/25/david-lynch-knows-hes-not-the-best-dad
Eraserhead (1977) is David Lynch’s debut feature film. Eraserhead follows a naive young man called Henry, who lives in an industrial and noisy world. Henry accidentally gets his girlfriend, Mary X, pregnant and Mary gives birth to a mutated baby. After living with Henry and the baby, Mary can’t take it anymore and leaves Henry to take care of the child. Following this we see Henry deal with the concepts of sex, fatherhood, adulthood, and mental health. The themes of sex and children are also seen in The Alphabet, which was created 8 years before Eraserhead was released.
The overall sound of Eraserhead is industrial, noisy, and claustrophobic. The sound design of Eraserhead was created by David Lynch and Alan Splet. Splet and Lynch sat down and listened through stock sound effects, however they decided to record the sound from scratch.
In an interview, Lynch says “picture dictates sound,” but he also says that it can be the other way round and that “sounds will conjure an image.” These two quotes are very true to Eraserhead, as the sound design helps the viewer feel more immersed in the film.
Eraserhead had a very low budget of $10,000. Eraserhead started as a student film when Lynch was studying at AFI in Los Angeles. Soon, the budget had run out and Lynch had to gather money in other ways. This happened multiple times, and every time the budget ran out, production would halt until they could afford to start again. Because of this, Lynch and Splet had a very small amount of money to use, so they had a D.I.Y. mindset while creating the sound.
I found Eraserhead’s sound design to be very inspirational to me while working on The Alphabet. Both the final product and the process of how Lynch and Splet created the sound was interesting and helpful to me because they had to use what was available to them to create the sound. I took inspiration from this process by using LCC’s foley and composition room to record vocals and foley and to mix the audio. I also used sounds from around me in my flat by recording my sink, boiler, and gas pipes with contact microphones and hydrophones.
One recurring sound throughout Eraserhead is the sound of wind, as heard in this scene (1:58 – 2:11). The wind in this movie was recorded by Splet in a village in Scotland called Findhorn. I found the use of taking wind, a normal everyday sound and making it disturbing and overbearing. In The Alphabet, I used the wind to use as the sound of a moving object. Instead of recording natural wind, I thought of creating this sound from another source. I used the Moog Mother 32 which is a semi analog synthesiser. The synthesiser has a noise function which creates a windlike noise. The reason I used the Mother 32 instead of real wind was that I could match the wind to the picture better then if I was to do it practically with real wind foley.
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.
Mulholland Drive is David Lynch’s 9th feature film, we follow Rita who is a survivor of a car crash but is stricken with amnesia after the accident. She finds herself in struggling actor Betty’s aunt’s house, where Betty finds Rita and is willing to help Rita find her identity.
From left to right, Betty (Naomi Watts) and Rita (Laura Harring)
Mulholland Drive at heart is a critique of the film industry and in particular how women are treated by the film industry. How the film industry will make or break a woman’s career if they don’t do something they are uncomfortable with, and the shady behind-the-scenes of controlling producers and egotistical directors.
The film is also incredibly surreal and dreamlike. Mulholland Drive constantly has this dreamlike aroma to it, the way the film is shot, edited and how the music and sound design are used blend together to make a nightmarish tone.
The film’s composer is Angelo Baldiamati who is a frequent collaborator of David Lynch working on many of his other works like Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet. Angelo creates a score full of deep brooding drones, the track Mr. Roque Betty’s Theme is a great example of this.
The track is occupied by a consistent drone with sounds drifting in and out. The main drone sounds airy, engulfed in this beautiful and long reverb. I found this really interesting and important to me working on the alphabet, by incorporating heavily reverbed drones into my piece, these drones can be found throughout most of Lynch’s films. The piece then breaks into a soaringly beautiful synth string passage which makes for a very emotional piece of music.
Film 2 – The Wizard Of Oz
The Wizard Of Oz is the 1939 adaptation of the book of the same name by Lyman Frank Baum. This film starts with our main protagonist Dorothy (Judy Garland) living a normal ‘black and white life in Kansas, she has a hard-working family and a dog called Toto. After the attempted euthanization of her dog, Dorothy’s house is swept up in a tornado, when the house has landed she walks outside into the land of oz.
The Wizard Of Oz is very much a surreal film, everything from the sets, characters, music, and special fx, everything feels surreal and dreamlike. This film also feels haunted, everything that could’ve gone wrong on a film set went wrong on The Wizard Of Oz. Directors came and went throughout filming leaving the finished work being directed by 4 different directors. Actor Margaret Hamilton being set on fire by a malfunction on set, using asbestos for some of the special effects e.g. snow. All of this makes watching the film feel very uneasy and uncomfortable at points, especially when you can point out when these things happened.
I’ve always been mildly creeped out by The Wizard Of Oz, but believe it to be a surrealist masterpiece. The way they introduce the characters felt very appropriate and worked to create the dreamlike feeling the film is going for. The film is very colourful in particular with the colours Green, Yellow, and Blue. The way the colours are very bright, and still, and are used heavily makes the film feel very hypnotic.
The Wizard Of Oz has apparently also been a big inspiration for David Lynch, recently a film called Lynch/Oz has been doing the film festival circuit to great reviews. I cannot find much information on David Lynch in The Wizard Of Oz but it’s clear how the dreamlike feeling of The Wizard Of Oz could have inspired him as a child and even as an adult.
I collaborated with my friend Rysia Kaczmar to work with vocals for the sound of this project. Rysia is my bandmate and also a very diverse vocalist. We booked the composition and foley room at LCC to record lots of vocal tracks for the piece. I showed Rysia The Alphabet and told her the concept of a child’s nightmare and she liked the concept and I started working on a script for her.
I wrote a script for Rysia consisting of lines from The Alphabet I wanted to keep like “Please remember you are dealing with the human form” and the children reciting their A,B,C’s. Rysia is a very performative and an intense vocalist, she is very good with improvisation which I think worked well for the piece because her expressive and intense style adds to the eerie atmosphere of the short.
Rysia recording her lines
The script I wrote for Rysia was done in my notes, which I really regret. I did go on to write a script which I timestamped where the vocal lines will go. I wish I did that before we recorded so now I know to do that beforehand. The reason I did do it on my notes was that Rysia is a very improvisational vocalist and diverse, so I thought the fewer instructions the better. I do agree with this to an extent but I do wish I wrote the script earlier.
The composition room gave us some technical difficulties when we started, with issues of no sound coming out. But when that was troubleshooted and solved we went straight to recording. I recorded onto Ableton as I was recording and creating my score on Ableton. I do plan to mix it in Pro Tools and not Ableton. All the lines were recorded dry with no effects on the vocals, as that would all be done in post by me.
My POV of recording this session
This recording session taught me how important vocal and foley recording is to create the overall sound of the film. Having this hands-on experience with recording was very beneficial to me. I learnt a lot about setting up microphones, routing them to the computer, troubleshooting issues, monitoring vocals, giving instructions on what to do vocally to Rysia, recording vocal foley, and working in a space like this.
Our Audio Technica 2035 Microphone set up in the foley room
This last paragraph was written just after the final edit was done before mixing.
The vocal sounds I was left with after this session was incredible and very important to the sound of the film. After some experimentation with the vocals by using effects and techniques like transposing, I found how the vocals should sound. I did lots of manipulation with Rysias vocals, I used them for the gasp of the figure at the 02:25:26 mark. Rysia imitated a baby crying which was used at the 01:00:00 mark. The crying sound transposed down -12st and was run through a plug-in called MISHBY, which is a tape machine emulator that specialises in detuning, distorting, and warping sounds. I found that worked really well on the baby crying and is also used on most of Rysia’s vocal tracks as a distortion.
The alphabet recite at the end of the alphabet was performed excellently by Rysia, it synced up perfectly with no editing, I only edited out the breathes between words. These vocals are run through a soviet wire recorder emulator called Wires. This gives the vocals a crackly and distorted sound, they also detuned Rysia’s vocals slightly creating more of an uneasy atmosphere.
Here are some of Rysia’s Vocals dry, then with effects.
For the sound design of The Alphabet, I will be using a mixture of recording techniques. The primary ones featured in this blog will be hydrophones, contact microphones, and handheld field recorders. I will be discussing where I want to record for each of these types of microphones and why.
Hydrophone
Hydrophones are omnidirectional microphones designed to record sound underwater from any direction. Hydrophones were first used by countries during the First World War. People were sent into submarines and used hydrophones to pick up on signals from possible enemies. Hydrophones in more recent years are used to record the sound of the ocean or water in general, used by shows like Blue Planet to record the sound of a location underwater.
My use of the hydrophone will be to experiment with recording in water, and take those recordings and manipulate them in Ableton. I want to transpose them up, down, stretch them, and reverse them in order to experiment. I will be using the hydrophone to create the sound of blood, and other textures throughout the piece.
Where will I be using the hydrophone
I thought of using my sink with the hydrophone. I plan on cleaning the sink, then put the hydrophone in out of the way of the water coming down, so it doesn’t hit the hydrophone directly. I want to record the sound of the sink filling up and draining. When the sink is full and the tap has stopped running I would like to splash my hands in the water, run my fingers through it, and see what sounds and textures that create.
Diagram of a hydrophone
Contact Microphones
A contact microphone is a microphone that records vibrations when attached to an object (e.g. table). I find recording with a contact microphone gives whatever I am recording a dissonant, uneasy atmosphere.
I record contact mics through a dictaphone, my dictaphone of choice will be the Zoom H5 as it is very portable and has good sound quality. I will be doing lots of these recordings at home and or outside. If I record at university via using the foley room I will be using higher quality microphones.
Zoom H5 Recorder.
When recording with contact microphones through a dictaphone, using the gain stage on the dictaphone like an instrument can be very helpful. By either turning the gain up or down on each sound you find, you can create a different atmosphere. If it is turned up it can be distorted, and dissonant. Meanwhile if recorded on a lower level can be much calmer and clearer. You have to be careful about turning the gain up too much, as elements of hiss can come into the track and ruin it.
The idea of using the contact microphone in my piece was through having to restart my boiler at home. I loved the sound of the water coming through the pipes and the hum of the boiler. So that’s what I plan on doing as of now.
Stalker (otherwise known as Сталкер) is Andrei Tarkovsky’s fifth feature film, it follows a guide (stalker), a writer, and a scientist. The guide leads the writer and the scientist to a place called ‘The Zone’. They escape from what looks like a wartorn, rundown, and military-dominated city to the zone which is the polar opposite. Complete solitude and silence and green scenery meanwhile their home is covered with a brown dusty tint. Within the zone, there is a room that supposedly grants any wish you can have. Throughout the film, we follow these 3 men and their conversations about their fears and what may lie in the zone.
Stalker is a beast of a movie, boasting a 2-hour and 41-minute runtime, but this movie (among other Tarkovsky films) utilises the runtime incredibly well and we left with a very meditative, thought-provoking, and intelligent movie.
The Sound
Stalker’s sound reminds me of a David Lynch quote “Sound is 50% of the film”. This is very much the case with Tarkovsky’s Stalker. Stalker uses sound in a very effective and thought-provoking way. Music is only heard for 17 minutes of this 161 minute movie. But the film feels very dense and full of sound when music is not playing. In his book Sculpting in time Tarkovsky talks about how he feels movies don’t need music at all. This is a common trait throughout Tarkovsky’s films as most of his films (including stalker) rely heavily on sound design than traditional music.
The composer/sound designer for Stalker is Eduard Artemyev. Artemyev is a Soviet/Russian composer who was a frequent collaborator of Tarkovsky. Creating the soundtrack/sound design for Solaris (1972), Mirror (1975), and Stalker (1979). Stalker was their last collaboration together. Much like Solaris and Mirror, what you hear in Stalker is primarily sound design. Artemyev doesn’t follow the traditional rules of diegetic and non-diegetic sound in Stalker. He challenges the viewer’s perception of what sound design is by doing something uncommon, this matches perfectly with the surreal atmosphere of Stalker.
For example, throughout the film, we see a few instances of fire being on screen. We see fire on screen we expect to hear the hiss of fire, and the crackling of firewood, but instead, we hear the sounds of water. One example of this is early on in the movie (9:30 mark), we see the character wash his hands and brush his teeth. There is a fire next to him. We never hear the sound of fire though, only the water that is coming out of the tap. He lights the fire with a match, but we only hear the match striking, we never hear the fire being lit. There is only one scene where the sound of fire is audible, they have a campfire at the 1:14:00 mark which is the sound of crackling firewood is audible. The use of water instead of fire seems like an intentional choice by Artemyev and Tarkovsky. Water is a recurring motif throughout stalker, with many scenes taking place in water or surrounding it.
Another interesting sound design choice happens at the 24:19 mark, A soldier is walking around looking for our protagonists who are escaping to the zone. The man walks to his motorcycle and as he is walking it sounds like a spring reverb being plucked, instead of the usual walking foley that would be used in most other movies.
Stalker really inspired me for its intentional minimalism, the score in the film is used sparingly and feels more impactful when used because the film is mostly sound design and foley. Tarkovsky and Artemyev treat sound design like it’s a part of the musical score which improves the film and the immersion of this world. My piece will be using primarily sound design with some traditional music elements. This film taught me to treat sound design like it’s apart of the overall score.
The Alphabet is David Lynch’s second short film, released 1968. The film is a combination of both animation and live-action, with the only actor starring in the movie being Lynch’s then-wife, Peggy Lynch. The idea for The Alphabet came from a visit Peggy had to her parent’s house. Lynch commented, “Her little niece was there, I think in a darkened room in a little bed, and was having a nightmare and repeating the alphabet in her nightmare”. Peggy’s strange story inspired him to make The Alphabet for the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. This film awarded him a spot at the American Film Institute, where he went on to produce his first feature film, Eraserhead.
What is it about?
David Lynch famously keeps the true meaning of his films a secret, as he wants the audience to have their own interpretation and experience of the work. After numerous watches and some research, I believe the film is about the fear of learning and growing up. Throughout the film, we follow a girl that is scared and tortured by the alphabet. We see different interpretations of the girl, both through abstract animation and live action. Children are a recurring theme in both this film and other Lynch works, such as Eraserhead. Lynch had a daughter (Jennifer Lynch) with his first wife Peggy Lynch when he was 22. Lynch’s thoughts on children are “I love all my children and we get along great, but in the early years, before you can have a relationship of talking to them, it’s tough,” he said. “And I would get divorced and stuff — I’ve got four kids and three divorces“. Since it was made around the time of his first child, we can assume that The Alphabet (and other films like Eraserhead) take inspiration from his own experiences as a father with a young child.
We hear the sound of a child crying, and the animation of the film has a childlike look to it which adds an eerie and uncanny atmosphere. The use of collage, colourful dots and the hand-drawn aesthetic makes it feel somewhat childlike as it feels like we are seeing everything from the girl’s perspective.
One line of dialogue said directly to the viewer near the end of the film, “Remember you are dealing with the human form”, represents that we are dealing with people, in particular children. Children are young and inexperienced and need to be taught about the world around them. When a child doesn’t understand something or a teaching style doesn’t fit them well, learning can be difficult and scary. This resonates with me personally, and I think this is Lynch critiquing the educational system. This still rings true 53 years after this film was released.
Abstract Interpretation
Peggy Lynch as the girl
In the abstract interpretation, we see what looks like a collage of a person. In the collage, we see a multitude of different art forms. The face is very abstract meanwhile the breast looks like it’s from an old renaissance painting from the 1500s. The rest of the body is made up of different types of abstract art. The fact the face and breast are the only human parts of this collage could be representing the girl becoming a woman. The sound in this part is very frightening, we hear the sound of a baby crying, and the baby crying sounds slightly sped up and broken which adds a sense of surrealism to the film. Since we see the collage being built and the vagina giving birth to the letters this could be related to the themes of birth. We hear the sound of the siren which gives a feeling of alertness, the siren sounds very similar to the baby’s voice, and the siren is shaky and slightly differs in pitch adding to the uncanniness of this short.
We see the use of nudity in the animation, the character has a breast and we see what looks like a penis fill with blood then switch to a distorted face. Next to the person a red box grows out of the ground and turns into a vagina, the letters A, B and C then come out of the vagina into the head of the person. This happens a couple of times until the collage gasps and then cut to the girl gasping too. The face of the animation then disintegrates with blood pouring down it. This is eerie and uncomfortable to watch, prompting the viewer to also feel scared by what is happening to the girl. I believe the use of nudity is used to portray conception birth and the letters represent teaching the child. Another representation of birth in this film takes place earlier in which a capital A gives birth to a lowercase A, which is another tie to birth. Throughout this entire scene, the siren is the most prominent sound.
During the final sequence of the film, the girl recites the alphabet. When she gets to the letter G, there is a close-up of the girl’s face where she looks terrified. I find it interesting why they stopped at the letter G. Does the G represent growing up? Girlhood? I think stopping at G was intentional. After finishing her reciting of the alphabet she spits blood all over the bed and then it cut to credits. My interpretation of her spitting blood is that she’s been infected by the alphabet, she sees adulthood as a disease and something she does not want. The alphabet and this whole film is a metaphor for both a fear of learning and growing up.
The Sound
The sound of this film is very human. There are non-diegetic sounds of a child crying, the voices of children saying the alphabet, and a siren. The human voices link with the quote, “Remember you are dealing with the human form”, reiterating the theme of humanity. There is also the diegetic sound of the girl reciting the alphabet. There are wind-like noises that sound like they’re made by a person, a ‘shhh’ noise. This again exhibits the recurring theme of humanity and people. The sound of the film was revolutionary for the time, no films were doing sound like this to score their films. Most film directors used orchestras and traditional means of composing. SInce Lynch was somewhat of a oneman band he had a lot of freedom to do what he wanted sonically. It could be seen as a bit crude nowadays given this sound has been done better by Lynch after this and it does sound a tad amatuerish but for the time it was quite polarizing. It still does hold up today as a terrifying piece of sound.
The way Lynch captured the sound of the crying child was by recording his newborn daughter, Jennifer Lynch, with an Uher tape recorder that was broken. The broken tape machine gives the crying a warbled and sped-up sound, it sounds like a baby but somewhat tampered with. A Uher tape machine is a german manufactured reel to reel tape machine, they were supposed to be portable unlike a lot of other reel to reel machines of that time (1960’s). This whole film would have been recorded onto tape. So I’m considering possibly using tape in some way for my recordings.
Uher Tape Machine
My Ideas
The Alphabet gives me a lot of inspiration for what I could be doing sonically. Ideas of musique concrete, field recordings, and noise started coming to my head the more I watched it. I would be interested to work with tape and digital. Using equipment like hydrophones, contact mics, Sennheiser 416 and collaborating with friends to create sounds and atmospheres. I would like to do a mixture of sound mixing/recording in the foley room/recording studio next door. This will give me good experience in working in a more professional manner. I plan on using pro tools but will be using ableton for experimentation and recording at home.
References
Hood, B. (2018). David Lynch knows he’s not the best dad. [online] Page Six. Available at: https://pagesix.com/2018/06/25/david-lynch-knows-hes-not-the-best-dad/
