Project Proposal
My main project is called Things that go Bump in the Night. It will be an immersive sound and light experience in the Capitol Theatre, and it is based on the experience of lying awake in your bedroom as a child and hearing unexplained noises in the dark.
The idea is to recreate that familiar domestic environment, but transform it into something tense and threatening. The audience will hear creaks, distant movements, room tone, and ambiguous night sounds spatialised around them, while lighting is used sparingly to accent particular sounds and intensify uncertainty rather than explain it.
So rather than showing a monster or a clear narrative event, the work is about the feeling that something might be there. That “might” is what makes it terrifying. I really want to play around of the idea of nostalgic terror, which in my eyes is terror you may have forgotten you had, or terror you have grown out of. Auditory Pareidolia is another phenomena I want to explore, which is how ambiguous and/or sourcless sounds can be interpreted as meaningful or threatening.
My second project is the Sublime collaboration with Jon and Sam. My take on this collaboration will take place in the Black Box using its 24.2 surround system, and it explores the terrifying side of the sublime through the distortion of a previously familiar composition. I may add some visuals/lighting element to this, but that may be a further collaboration.
The idea is that our earlier Sublime work becomes fractured and unstable, moving toward something closer to the emotional territory of Everywhere at the End of Time. In other words, instead of fear through immediate or possible threat, this project explores terror through erosion, memory loss, and gradual disintegration.
WIP Update + Capitol
Not much has been done unfortunately on the spatial and Pharos side of things, but I have started collating a small library of sounds that I can use to create my sound design. I plan to write a short intro and record my sister and my mother for some voiceblines to set the scene (e.g a “goodnight”), as I believe that my story might be a bit ambiguous without a short intro.
From the presentations today, i was inspired by Jack’s work and I may consider having the triangle as a constant throughout my piece as a kind of ominous presence. Samaa’s work was also really great, and I like the idea of the incursions flashing and turning off the other lights, maybe if I did an inverse and flashed the whole room? Gabriel’s was also really cool, I liked the subtle changes with the lights. I’m not sure how I would play around with this, but I think this may be a good tool in my arsenal.
One thing I did notice was the walls were a lot dimmer than I thought, and the roof was much brighter than i anticipated, so when the walls turned off it was barely noticeable. For my next draft, i think having the walls as the main source of focus and removing the roof from the equation for the time being may be smarter, and also suspending the roof for another moment in the piece.
My plan for the next week is to start collating some of these sounds i have recorded, and hopefully have at least of the composition done, ideally I want to aim for a complete first pass. I’m still going to aim for 7.1, but will also do a stereo mix as well.
My sounds so far… need to do some of my own recording
My 7.1 test – this was thrown together quickly as I just wanted to test something small to get a sense for the space
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