An exploration of generative environmental sound recessed into an esoteric, spatialised interface. You are transported into solemn vignettes of something that resembles a place in time. The only thing to do here is listen and leave. This interactive piece encourages the player to immerse themselves in a series of ephemeral sonic milieus – expanding on the acousmatic threads of Francisco Lopez & Pierre Schafer.

The piece is assembled in Dreams PS4 (an increasingly obscure yet magical intuition-based game engine) and makes extensive use of the experimental audio and visual systems. Sonorous Body echoes the decay of obsolete technology and the intrigue it imparts on its users.

The soundscapes are composed of obfuscated and representational bespoke field recordings. The custom audio generation system binds and manipulates them into ambisonic sound fields that attempt to challenge our perceptions of bucolic nature. The procedural generation techniques allow for a magnitude of ghostly sonic snapshots.

“You know we don’t want to return to Unthank. I asked for a town with sunlight.”

“Would Provan suit you’ ‘The inhabitants there speak a kind of English”.

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“Industrially speaking, you see, Unthank is no longer profitable, so it is going to be scrapped and swallowed. In a piecemeal way we’ve been doing that for years, but now we can take it en bloc and I don’t mind telling you were rather excited. We’re used to eating towns and villages, but this will be the first big city since Carthage and the energy gain will be enormous.”

(Alistair Gray, Lanark, 1981)

This imagery of a Scottish council swallowing cities for energy gain and that some of these cities don’t have sunlight was so vivid and so bizarre I had to follow the thread.

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I aimed to extrapolate on Grays ideas and re-frame them in a futuristic world, asking the question, what if this council never stopped and built bigger and bigger cities in untold pocket dimensions and what would this feel like for normal people? I liked the subtext Gray was alluding to, the Thatcher-esqe dissolution of cities no longer profitable combined with the unpredictable and dreich Scottish winters where we live without depending on the sun. This short animation pursues a Glaswegian narrative based on Gray’s works while aiming to subvert the typical screen-cities of Mega New York/Tokyo, bringing it home to Scotland and incorporating varying degrees of high future and bog-standard Glaswegian city planning. The film explores something sensory and dizzying, peering into a world that creates more questions than it answers. Its stand alone as a story but also act as a slice of a larger tale.

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The CGI involves building scenes in Dreams PS4 with an amalgamation architecture drawing from Scottish municipal, brutalist, and cyberpunk styles. Visuals were inspired by films like Fallen Angels (1995) and Bladerunner 2049 (2017), recreating some of the iconic shots. Drones were designed simply to be characterised by sound. Final shots were processed in Premier Pro.
The SFX, VO, and Music was was composed and designed by me and produced using Ableton 12 and Protools. A key technique was in experimenting with diegetic/non-diegetic barrier to destabilise the visuals and obfuscating known sounds, particularly the car. The general sound design aimed to be low tech and naturalistic like Dune (2021) and Drive (2011) but draws from the clinical high tech fantasy of Metal Gear Solid 4 (2008). The Dialogue, a phone call, features a dejected driver and his excitable brother. Although bewildering, performances are intended to feel authentic, importantly accommodating real Glaswegian accents. Dialogue expands the world building.

Awumbuk: There is an emptiness after visitors depart. The walls echo. The space which felt so cramped while they were here now seems weirdly large. Sometimes everything seems a bit pointless. The indigenous Baining people who live in the mountains of Papua New Guinea are so familiar with this experience that they name it awumbuk. They believe departing visitors shed a kind of heaviness when they leave, so as to travel lightly. This oppressive mist hovers for three days, leaving everyone feeling distracted and apathetic. To counter it, the Baining fill a bowl with water and leave it overnight to absorb the festering air. The next day, the family rises very early and ceremonially flings the water into the trees, whereupon ordinary life resumes.

T. Watt Smith. 2015

Working in a team of multi-disciplinary students, we worked to capture the raw emotion experienced by this small death into an audio-visual piece. The team worked cooperatively in creating one cohesive piece, outlining the key physical and emotional stages of the ceremony, by which the tribe set out a bowl of water to capture the cloud of dismay and thick emptiness and empty this bowl to cleanse themselves of Awumbuk. The team members each worked in layers to compose each component to provide a rich, full representation of the experience: layering sound compositions pulled from noise-making sessions; analogue visuals created in-studio; animated composition sequences created in Adobe After Effects; and composite visual overlays in Max MSP. The outcome captures 4 minutes of collective footage taking the audience on an emotional journey similar to that of the tribe. The beginning sets the tone of the tranquil peace experienced in day-to-day life, before the harsh and disruptive build of activity disturbed the otherwise placid waters. The flurry of vivid colour and emotion prevail throughout the parting of loved ones, leaving a muddied, thick, and heavy atmosphere. This swamped emotional disarray is then collected, in ceremony, and cleared from the atmosphere to restore the original, undisturbed tranquillity.

The Situated Piano takes inspiration from Phillipe Manoury’s Pluton (1988), which combines piano and computer in a way that balances control and generative chaos. The aim is to follow this path by imposing transformative rules on the piano itself to explore novel music styles and uncover hidden tones and textures. Historically, the piano, invented by Bartolomeo Cristofori, surpassed earlier instruments like the clavichord and harpsichord by offering greater dynamic range. Initially accessible only to the European elite, it became associated with high status and cultural capital. Despite its complex history, the piano became ubiquitous partly due to its functional simplicity and the player’s perceived perfect and immediate control over time, amplitude, and frequency. This control instils a sense of predictability, and the instrument’s design has been refined for centuries, remaining functionally similar for 300 years.

The system specifically challenges two core “rules” of the piano’s canon: its established frequency and amplitude range and its predictability in time.

Firstly, to break the frequency and amplitude, the project creates the illusion of strings extending beyond the physical limits of the instrument.This is influenced by prepared pianos, a technique pioneered by John Cage where objects are placed on strings to disrupt tuning and create unstable harmonics, and artists like Volker Bertelmann (Hauschka) who use techniques like vibrators. The project combines these ideas with digital processing, feeding lower regions into a spectral resonator for sounds of long, rattly strings and upper regions into a physical resonator suggesting tiny strings. A ramped tremolo unpredictably excites the upper resonator.

Secondly, to challenge the dimension of time, the project employs a delay circuit that recalls past events. Inspired by Bugge Wesseltoft’s work with loopers that chop and layer sonic fragments, this project uses a pseudo-random injection of past sounds. A delay system freezes and opens based on a sequencer, splicing in microsound loops from several seconds ago, adding unpredictability that encourages engaging decision-making. In essence, like other artists challenging the piano canon, this project introduces unpredictability and uses external forces to expand the sonic possibilities of the instrument. It works within the established framework of the piano, recognising its perfected design while pushing its boundaries.

I made use of Ableton 12’s Racks to design a malleable and generative effect system that situates the piano within the field I established myself in. Moreover, the piano itself is provided by Moddart’s Pianoteq, an expertly designed physical modelling of the piano. I opted for this instead of a live recording as I was able to further contort the piano into something unpredictable and elusive, making using of  microtuning and midi control.

The final composition is available to listen to but I have also included some of the test pieces to better get a sense of how this system can warp the sonic input.

Through the environment there are soundscapes emitting from various object. Some of these are leaning on the side of realistic whereas others fall into supernatural. For example, the radio masts and boats have a generally representational sound, but the audio source is slightly warped and distorted. They also resonate in an unnatural way. The dark ambience from other objects, like the windows in the first cabin and the wardrobe in the next are completely nonrepresentational. They emit a loop of a warped underworld. Processed samples of wind, contact mic recordings, piano, and waves are some of the textures used to create these loops. The technical intention was to experiment with Google Resonance emitters as they have the ability to create a very focused field of audio. You can tune these to the point where they emit a spatialised field of only a few inches wide and a few feet forward when in the shotgun configuration. My aesthetic intention was to create sounds inspired by the likes of games known for their dark ambiences. Notably, Bloodborne, for its use of audio in the sequences of talking to characters behind locked doors. It’s a cheap but effective trick to use when adding depth to a game space – the acousmatic sound your only option to comprehend an unknowable sequence. Moreover, I looked at games like Alien Isolation, Inside and the Stalker series. They all rely heavily on environmental audio to inject horror and tension to their respective style of game. Alien Isolation for example consistently keeps you on your toes with the constant rumbling and whirring of the space station. This distorts the players experience into one where no environment feels fully safe. A similar approach was used in Inside but in this case the story is told almost entirely through the mood of the environmental audio with each section introducing new layers of cosmic industrial horror. I found the bridge sequence and underwater sequences to be particularly effective in conveying this and tried to replicate some of the distorted, subdued, and brutal textures Martin Andersen created for the game.

The design of the footsteps was partly inspired by Escape from Tarkov, it being a hyper realistic game based in unity. The visual style prompted me to revisit the game where I drew inspiration from the sparkly and crunchy player SFX. I opted for a spline system that would run the audio around the coastline relative to the player. This is a much more efficient implementation with regards to performance, but it also negated the risk of having any phasing or dead spots where the water could not be heard – factors that could break the immersion. I also implemented an interior audio system based on FMOD snapshots. This is a simple but effective method to differentiate between the various game spaces. When the player walks into a building a snapshot event is triggered which smoothly brings down the outside ambience, brings up a room tone wind, and sends the player SFX to a reverb. There are two sizes of reverbs available to better match the different buildings in the level. The outside ambience becomes uncannily quiet to better accentuate the presence of the dark ambience.