Dreams are a way in which the brain tries to synthesize the needs of the human being, to the point that it often seems real when it is not.
Usually leaving a vague memory of meaningless scenes, sensations of colors and even extracts of outside sounds.
Dream of the soul synthesizes a world that appears to be what it is not, although it yearns for it to the point of corrupting its very meaning. Where the imaginary becomes so real that it confuses our daily life, creating a mess between the actions that one often performs in these dreams.
Piece composed between October and November 2023 as a commission from the Creative Workshop VI Acousmatic of the Musical and Sound Arts Degree of the Universidad Austral de Chile.
It consists of an Acoustic piece that lasts 8:51 minutes, which was created from the thought of imitating the natural, listening in stereo and the integrity of different treatments that give the sensation of sections of the same work.
The recreation of natural sounds was the main guide and driving force for the work, so they were focusing on three elements, rain, footsteps and different birds. I must clarify that the laughter included was initially intended to be created from scratch, but due to the constant attempt and error to achieve something human, which was not achieved at the time, predetermined recordings were taken from the Vocaloid program. Even so, the challenge given as a proposal for the work was to make all those sounds from scratch using VCV Rack, so, taking as a reference the spectral aspects of each sound, they tried to recreate as similar as possible to what is heard in nature, thus assimilating the fictitious origin of the sound.
After having the VCV Rack patches ready for these three different sound concepts, samples of the improvised section of approximately 20 minutes were recorded until they had all the possible sound varieties that could be obtained without losing the “naturalness” of the sound.
Using the REAPER program, they selected interesting pieces to be able to use directly or to modify them in the Audacity, Cecilia 5 or Mammut programs, thus altering their tempo, pitch, reverberation and duration in each audio. As mentioned above, the montage for the composition was also done using the REAPER program where little by little, as if it were a collage, I assembled sections according to a timeline of the presentation of the sounds.
With that in mind, the timeline can be described in four parts, the first part being the presentation of the sound elements trying to create a first stage of dream, diffuse and still with some consciousness; There is a high use of the perception of stereo space to move on to the second section, which highlights a burlesque and tense side to the type of sounds used, as what was left in the first part, has been deformed by the concept of "dream and synthesized reality" in addition to the more open use of space and perception of certain sounds, thinking of this "speaker-like" space where the sound is more audible thus giving the sensation of proximity and spatial movement. The mix between the panning movement, intensity and filtering create this sensation of spatiality that distinguishes Acusmatica music. For the third part, a bit of pointillism of sounds is played with in a reverberant space, giving the sensation of a watery space that mixes two sound aspects that can be distinguished from each other, similar but individual. In the case of the fourth part, it would be an amalgamation between the end of the third part and a new section, as if it were a bad memory, using raspy, low and continuous sounds. Finally, it reaches a fifth, more coda-like section where diffuse and distant sounds predominate in the background, as if they were in a foggy room, this is due to the way the filters are used. The coda, on the other hand, gradually reveals certain sounds that are clearer from their origin until reaching the end, closing with a great finale in crescendo, taking the listener out of that trance caused by the fourth and fifth sections.
One of the things that can be done with the effects in REAPER is the automation of the parameters of each track, thus making more spontaneous or directed changes as needed, increasing and decreasing each point, even the volume and panning per track.
Finally, the result of the work was a journey that supports its title, where the concept of dream, perception, synthesized reality and the creation of a fictitious space are the soul of the project itself, together with the experimentation and creation of electronic sounds from scratch.
