Strange Tales - musings of a sound monkey

Happy nearly Halloween again chumsies! And with Halloween comes the raft of increasingly traditional activities - trick-or-treating, Asda trying to sell 30 different types of plastic skeleton, eating all the sweets the local kids didn’t come round for/turned their nose up at/shunned in favour of hard cash etc, and trying to do fiddly wiring work in the freezing cold and dark at a massive concrete space in Rotherham.

Yes, it’s Magna time again, and once again the GNG Entertainment roadshow has taken up residence in the Face of Steel Hall. Last year’s Hybrid-X was our first big attraction with the GNG chap, an everyday love story of animal-human hybrids and their love of human flesh, stuck together in a super-secret biological lab with hilarious consequences (more or less). This year, we are entering the murky world of post-apocalyptic survivalists who are apparently a bit miffed that there hasn’t been an actual apocalypse yet (no matter what you think of Cheryl Cole), and have been locked away for nearly 50 years underneath what has now become Magna. Despite the warnings from popular cinematic history, GNG have taken the decision to open the vault, Bunker13, and see what’s inside…. what could possibly go wrong…..again.

And with Bunkers, come sound…. or so I thought…. the first thing I tend to do with a new project like this is develop a set of visual style sheets that get pinned up around the studio. I think I’m slightly synaesthetic in my approach to sound and I’m much better at generating sound canvases to images than just starting with a blank canvas. I think it’s come from my love of movie soundtracks since i was a kid and when I first realised the power that sound could have in reinforcing visuals. But, interestingly, the reality of sound in large underground spaces is quite counter-intuitive. I’ve been to a number of old bunkers and tunnel systems in my life (I was brought up by rats and we liked foreign holidays), including the wartime tunnels in Jersey, the hydroelectric tunnels in Manapouri NZ and a few actual nuclear bunkers, and the interesting thing about the sound of them is…. there’s very little.

Most of the sound in tunnels and bunkers is generated by yourself, one of the key things about building an underground bunker is that it isolates the occupants from the outside environment, and hence sound. The walls are fantastic reverberant surfaces and tunnels make great sounding chambers, but there’s generally very little down there to make sound itself (as a billion schoolkids bellowing “Whooooooooo” and “Boooooogies” in echoey spaces will attest). Even a trip to other media examples of bunkers (I’m a massive fan of the Fallout games which all feature survivalist bunker environments) reveals a very lazy cabal of sound-designers indeed, they all seem to have gone for reality…. imagine that….

So, I’m on my own here - that’s fine. Been there before…. usually am with GNG - (I remember Gary Oldman being asked during the filming of Dracula how he prepared for the part when Winona and Sadie were off doing needlework and pony-riding, and he replied “I’m a 1000yr old blood obsessed warrior king who has renounced the church and turned completely to darkness - how the f**k do you think i prepare for the part???”)

The first key was populating the space myself. Questioning the brief about what exactly the monsters of the week were helped somewhat. Mutated and crazed but more or less human. Good, can work with that. Lots of muted screams, wails, inhuman noises, scattered around the sound canvas with varying reverbs and EQs. I tend to set up each canvas with 6 vocal channels - 3 left, 3 right - 2 each panned about 5% LR, 20% LR and 2 80% LR, each pair with their own aux fx channels. This means placing sound elements in the spaces is much more visual in the DAW arrange window, an approach which I find really intuitive. The same is then repeated for other fx elements and there are usually a few channels for beds and drones.
 
One of the pictures in my style sheet was of the Brackley bunker, designed for emergency management planning in the event of a nuclear war. A huge feature of the structure were massive ventilation turbines, and air scrubbing systems. Excellent! HUMMING and WIND! The drum and bass of soundscape design. One of the things I’d wanted to do after last year at Magna and spending a lot of time in the building, was record some of its own environmental sounds and use them in this attraction. The first available windy day, me and the R09hr hoofed off to Magna to record the building itself. Various bits of it howl like a banshee when there’s wind blowing thru and so I’ve got a stack of various metallic surfaces and gaps acting like giant reeds, great sounds. Many of those have now been built into the drones and sound beds and provide a starting point for the rest of the sounds. Some of the sounds were loaded into a sampler module as well so they could be played and modulated in real-time during bounce-down as well, giving a much more organic and dynamic sound canvas.

The mighty Omnisphere was mined for ethereal and darker tones as usual. The long evolving pads and drones, combined with the Harmonia Engine which can be assigned to the mod wheel also gives these already characterful sounds more movement and space.  Reverb levels needed to be dialled right up to create that ‘false environment’ as the physical walls of the attraction were plasterboard and doing a great job of deadening the entire space.

One major difference this year has been that there was no custom written ‘theme music’ unlike Hybrid, Killers and Haunted. This was at the request of GNG who wanted a pounding bass sound instead for the laser maze area (supposedly an air scrubbing system), so just to serve them right, I couldn’t just leave it at that could I, too easy…. so… in fact the track is made up of actual metallic striking samples rather than drum sounds and is designed to emulate some form of massive mechanical system on the verge of oscillating itself to death. this hopefully ramps up the urgency for folk to make their way round the maze fairly briskly, which is of course impossible, so all it actually is aimed to do is disorientate and confuse. So far…. it seems to be working!

Bunker13 runs from 21st-31st October at Magna in Rotherham.