Danielle and I have for quite some time in the process been working together, however now it is time to veer off into our specialist roles before later merging our work when complete. The full draught of the film has been received so I will begin composition of music and Danielle will begin sound design.

I similarly discovered that Danielle’s flat room sounds significantly clearer than my room. Paul White wrote an article describing that monitor placement in a room is an intensely scientific process and quotes:

it’s generally accepted that working with the speakers set up along the longest wall is preferable, especially in smaller rooms, as this minimises problems caused by side-wall reflections (Sound On Sound, 2002).

The issue with my own mixing space is that my speakers can only be positioned on the computer desk in my rather tight space and as a result–side-wall reflections are rapidly building up in my monitoring position, therefore falsifying the true mix. Danielle’s room has the freedom to alter the position of the monitors leaving enough space in front for the sound to travel and therefore dispersing any reflections towards the monitors. We have therefore decided to set up a studio there, utilising the acoustics in the promise of speedy mixing and finally–increased productivity. New location below!

As previously mentioned in an earlier post. It was required of myself to write a full orchestral version of the lullaby for the ‘Light Dance’ scene. After receiving the visuals, my original, estimated version written at the start of the project did not sit right with the visuals. After analysis, I attributed it to the following factors:

Creative & Technical Decisions

As stipulated in the above table. The music needed “darkening” up. The piano was the most important instrument as it delivered the lead lines of the melody, therefore I wanted to achieve a raw and aggressive performance. The basics of this was achieved by attacking the keys with more vigor, however other factors included:

• Compression: I employed the CLA-3A compressor plugin by waves of which is modeled off the vintage LA-3A solid-state compressor and is one of mix engineer, Chris Lord Algae’s goto compressors. Algae is well known for his loud and aggressive mixes and the plugin seemed to deliver the desired effect when pushing it fairly hard. 
• Saturation: To further add to the aggressive performance, I ran the signal through Decapitator by SoundToys.“Saturation in any form adds harmonics to the sound. The perceived volume is also raised as natural compression and limiting occurs when the effect is introduced” (music tutsplus, 2012).This allowed the piano to sound less MIDI as the plugin offered a more vintage sound. The added compression, limiting and therefore, perceived loudness also heightened the aggression of the performance allowing it to pierce through the mix.

Piano can be heard here:

I similarly employed another saturation trick on the double bass. This was not only to give it an edginess but to allow it to stand out enough to compete with the other instruments of which distortion “can help the bass cut through a mix in a useful way” (Sound on Sound, 2011). To do this, I set up a mono auxiliary channel with some distortion and rolled off the low end to allow for the main bass to occupy that spectral space and sent some of the bass signal to it.

Here is the bass with the aux channel muted:

Here is the same bass with added distortion:

I have also posted an example of notational dissonance. For example, the next clip of the bass plays out in the melodic minor key of C. Notice how the final note of the bar has dropped a semitone. The dropping of a semitone helped create an aesthetic very reminiscent to the style of Danny Elfman.

Finally, here is the full, completed sequence. Notice the effect of starting with the music playing over a radio speaker in the corridor before switching to it’s full, non-diegetic form:

According to Kyoko Koizumi professor at Otsuma Women’s University; Japanese composer for many of Studio Ghibli’s films, Joe Hisaishi

employs four identifiable musical approaches in Miyazaki’s films, which are: his use of Dorian mode to create an historical European feel; western classical-styled music to suggest occidental themes; pentatonic scales, natural minor scales, and other ‘Asian’ musical elements to enhance Japanese and oriental images; and an eclectic style of Japanese popular songs in which Japanese and western musical approaches are mixed (Koizumi, 2010, cited in Coyle, 2010, p.61). 

This notion of instrumental and melodic signification can be attributed to a longstanding partnership between melody & tonality; and mythology, culture & tradition Ie. the evolutionary development of music over time has come to resonate forms of cultural identity. For example, in the animated film, Spirited Away, Hisaishi wanted to portray an “otherness” to the spirit world. By doing so he employed the Okinawan scales of Indonesia as they “are considered to sound exotic, as they resemble Indonesian music more than that of Japan’s adjacent regions” (Koizumi, 2010, p.69). Therefore, melody and instrumentation play an essential role in the signification of meaning.

In the scene where Susie is running through the forest. I chose to practice this theory by employing a whole tone scale of which plays upwards from the fundamental key note in full tones until the next octave.

The scale is often used to signify ominousness of which an example can be heard in the opera Ruslan and Lyudmila in a leitmotif used to represent the evil dwarf, Chernomor. The scale is referred to by author of Tchaikovsky’s Operas, Henry Zajaczkowski as “Chernomor’s whole-tone-scale sphere of evil” (2005, p.22). The symmetry of the scale’s intervals are mathematically beautiful and can arguably be described as lacking or removed from any obvious emotion; as the nature of its perfection–its pure symmetry; does not exist anywhere in nature. However, it could be that very notion that makes the music work in it’s evocation of evil; it’s melodies resonate an air of coldness and emotional distance, therefore providing an unhinged and brutal element to the visuals. You can hear the implementation of the scale in Debussy’s Voiles here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVV0jkZC4jI

Here is the final scene utilising the whole tone scale in the key of C:

In the scene where Susie is running through the forest after hearing a hallucination of her father. It was required to create something fast-paced and thrilling. When simply viewed, the imagery suggests a relatively slow pace of speed and it is not until the visuals are paired with the music that ones perception of speed is amended. French film scholar, Michel Chion writes:

Visual and auditory perception are of much more disparate natures than one might think. The reason we are only dimly aware of this is that these two perceptions mutually influence each other in the audiovisual contract, lending each other their respective properties by contamination and projection (1994, p.9).

Utilising Chion’s noted influence of sound on vision and vice versa, I attempted to increase the pace by composing an uptempo piece of orchestral music to transport Susie towards her breakdown. Chion attributes the reasoning behind this phenomenon being that 

sound is the vehicle of language, and a spoken sentence makes the ear work very quickly; by comparison, reading with the eyes is notably slower (1994, p.10).

Below is a video of the final scene.