Hello. I’m Damien, a musician and producer from the UK. I’ve scored some independent film, adverts and theatrical pieces.  I produce and remix bands.  I have in interest in new music technologies  and interfaces (eg, the Monome) and generating new music software.  I also enjoy making field recordings.

I chose to create an audio depiction of an imaginary animal being born.

I decided from the beginning not to base the piece around ‘music’ and to concentrate on generating tone from real and artificial spaces.  I created an impulse response by recording in a large empty metal container and imported it into a software convolution reverb.

I generated some field recordings of various outdoor scenes and animal activity.  I ended up choosing a rural ambience, my girlfriend’s parrot and my cat grooming herself.

These recordings were imported into a DAW and I edited them for particular, useful highlights.

To give myself structure and something to aim for, I decided some narrative would help me to decide on individual textures and timings.  

So … a robotic lynx is pregnant and outside, looking for somewhere to give birth.  She walks from stage right to the centre stage and finds a large metal door. She manages to push it open and finds herself padding through a large, roomy, metallic antechamber.  She pads up to and through another door that bangs hard behind her.  In this room, she can hear slowly throbbing industrial bassy tones, that might be some kind of hidden engine or reactor. The lynx pads on and flops down on to the floor.  Silence.  A cracking, tearing, quick birth. More silence. She begins to lick the cub who comes round and begins calling.

To generate the lynx’s gait, I found that the recording of the cat grooming herself had a natural rhythm that might work for an animal walking.  I processed that through a resonant filter to add a metallic quality.  The door sounds were recordings of simple shed doors being closed and then put through a software convolution reverb that utilised the impulse response I made earlier.  I was careful to edit the tail at points so there was true silence that offered contrast to the following dramatic sonic events (eg, door slamming, the birth, the nuzzling of the cub).  The industrial engine throb was generated using a slowly oscillating sine synth pitched down.  The birth sounds are heavily processed paper tearing sounds.  The cub nuzzling sounds are taken from my cat grooming herself.  The waking cries of the cub are processed samples of my girlfriend’s parrot.

After arranging the elements to my satisfaction, I gently mastered the piece using Ozone to highlight the side elements of the stereo image and rolled off some unnecessary low frequencies.

I love sound.  I love dynamic in particular - the change from silence and the inherent drama in mundane sounds.  As Mr Cage said, "Whether I make them or not, there are always sounds to be heard and all of them are excellent.” 

It would be exciting to win this scholarship.  It would help me formalise my skills and keep me doing what I love.


VFS and SoundCloud Full Scholarship Challenge 2011: An imaginary animal being born_Damien Shingleton

Hello. I’m Damien, a musician and producer from the UK. I’ve scored some independent film, adverts and theatrical pieces. I produce and remix bands. I have in interest in new music technologies and interfaces (eg, the Monome) and generating new music software. I also enjoy making field recordings

I chose to make a piece based on the colour red.

The first thing I explored was a possible perceptual relationship between tone and colour.  The experience of synesthesia seemed appropriate.  It was interesting to read about famous synesthetes, particularly Amy Beach, the American pianist and composer, who said she experienced G Major as red, and Louis Bertrand Castel, the French Jesuit monk who claimed to see red as a G.  He went ton to propose a machine called the clavecin oculaire that would translate colour into tone.

I got onto Plato who, as an extension of Pythagoras’ thinking, proposed that you could sonically represent red as a perfect fourth, eg, C and F and so on, a quartal harmony.

I found that the band of visible light we call red has a frequency itself, somewhere between 400 and 484 THz.  Divide that by a trillion and choose an average and you get 442 Hz, pretty much an A.

There’s also a technical term ‘red noise’ that describes sound that is generated based on Brownian motion.

I consider all these bits of information interesting and so on but I acknowledge that they’re fairly arbitary.  But then, not being a synesthete, I used them as my starting points.

So … I generated 90 seconds of red noise in Cooledit and started playing with it in some Max patches and some noise reduction software, using it as a noise profile and subtracting it from various sounds.  I ended up generating a dynamic sweeping resonant bass sound and a fairly convincing kick and snare/shot sound.  I found what I thought was a natural rhythm in the weird bass tone and started playing against that with the kick and snare in a DAW.  I side chained it all up together through software compressors along with the originally generated red noise and got it all pumping a bit.

Then I used an orchestral virtual instrument and slowly built up a perfect fourth and added the A slowly.  It all sounded a lot darker than I thought it would, quite creeping and so on, so I ended up synthesizing a weird alarm type sound based a tone filter I had notched at various points in divisions and multiples of 440 Hz.

I mastered the whole thing in Ozone and again notched out a mastering equalizer at divisions and multiples of 440 Hz to try to make any incidental/accidental As ring through.

The final thing’s not the prettiest piece in the world but it ended having a building dangerous feel that some people might associate with the colour red.


Damien Ess