AURAL
Live Binaural Sound
After One Moment show we wanted to continue to explore the effects of Live 3D Sound. .
We made the choice to focus again on the sound of various object’s and actions, playing with the gap between the visual and the aural world as well as creating body sensations with sound drawing again on ASMR. We used the sound of hairbrush on the binaural head to play with audience members' sensations, and recorded familiar phone notification sounds binaurally, to play with the audience's attention. In redeveloping The Timestealers we want to further our investigation into the distortion of space allowed by binaural sound.
The Voice of the Time Squirrel
In our redevelopment process we experimented with the different modes of recording in order to create different effects.
We also decided to bring in another female voice to represent the Time Squirrel, an absent Overlord figure who had aural control over us, the Timestealers, who never spoke during the performance. With this we wanted the Time Squirrel to be a kind of authoritarian figure, in some ways mirroring the invisible voice that encourages a contemporary culture of productivity.
We recorded this in mono so it would enter the audiences head in a powerful, direct way. As the Time Squirrel existed in a diffferent time dimension, we used a variety of sound effects to paint her world, as well as different voice effects. The Time Squirrel's voice was played by Kristina Hopkins.
A new perspective was also how rhythm of the sound and playing with directions can affect time sensations as well as introducing the concept of productivity. We developed a trope of peanuts, which we counted, peeled and broke in various polyphonic rhythms.
An Inspiration...
We also adopted a sequence of repetition where we repearted and rewinded our movements, and when experimenting in the studio we found that the music which worked best was that which was completely detached from the futuristic world and for this we used The Temptations’ song, ‘My Girl’ which we played, and replayed, on a loop.
You can listen to this as well as some of our favourite rehearsal music on the Spotify playlist opposite.
Creating music, abusing music
We wanted to find ways to create a futuristic world, play with time and repetition and decided to write our own original music for the show in order to create this cartoon-inspired world.
We were inspired by the 80’ synth pop/electro synth music we used to warm up to. As we were building the narrative and wanted to create the futuristic world we decided to use synthesised sound.
We played around with devising movement to the synth sounds, or pretending that they were controlling our bodies and this developed into an arcade game-style fight scenemusic, so we created a scene when Anna plays live synth music.
The theme song composed by Anna for our transformation into becoming Timestealers was also inspired by 80’s as well as cartoon music.