The Sound of Kaihōgyō Matt Were
The sound for this project should be that in which reflects the state of mediation via walking, coined by the Buddhist monks as, Kaihōgyō. With that in mind we set out making our own samples that we thought interpreted this state of mind. Through much trail and error a couple of techniques shone through to the group, that presented themselves well for the task in hand.
The first of which was, instrument hacking, this is the idea of using instruments in a way in which they were not intended to be used. We experimented with taping a SM57 to a guitar tuned to C, then proceeded to play it with a Violin bow the signal going into the DAW was then processed with effects such as granular synthesis, reverb and echo, making the sound that came out, unique and what we thought would fit our criteria well.
The second idea was to creating soundscapes of different environments that peoples travel in, we initially had the idea of recoding the entirety of a journey from Brighton to the Tate Modern, but soon realised that would be an inefficient way of working. Elaborating on the idea of soundscapes while traveling, we thought we could take a modern twist on this aged practice. Recording sounds that are constantly around you whilst traveling, that one become’s desensitised to. Blending all these sound scapes together and putting them through a granular synthesiser’s with filters and such also effecting the sound, which resulted in some strange soundscape’s which we thought worked well.
The idea of adding binaural beats to the project was something that interested us, the connection between two frequencies being played close to each other was something that linked directly into Chakra healing practices, Tibetan Singing Bowls are the earliest example that we found of binaural beats being used for Chakra healing purposes, the frequencies that are supposedly the holders of these healing properties are called, Solfeggio Frequencies, there are six of them, and if all played in harmony it was suppose to, “infuse great spiritual blessings and transformation”. Solfego frequencies were founded in ancient Christian times, were the some of the first Christian chants were sung in this scale. We found that a clean sine wave playing at 60hz with another sine wave playing at a two frequency of set was the most suitable for use in our scenario, it invoked peace and calm, ideal for a mediative state.