Strange Tales - musings of a sound monkey

During the summer 2010, GNG Entertainment brought their first installation Scare Attraction to our theatre and we’ve developed a very creative relationship since that first event. Long time friends Gav & Gaz set up GNG Entertainment to provide a new take on installation scare attractions. Their enthusiasm for dark entertainment is infectious and the creative freedom they give their technical team to help create as immersive an experience as possible means that sitting down with a blank canvas to write soundscapes for a new attraction is always a really exciting prospect.

Since Deranged, for which we only really edited and augmented some pre-existing stock library music, we took on the challenge of Hybrid-X, a massive multiple-room installation at Magna Science Centre in Rotherham. We had a blank slate to produce sounds and music to accompany a scare attraction where mutant scientists ran amok. On the brief for that installation were some custom welcome music for a fictitious genetic modification corporation, lots of alarms and piped announcements, facility soundscapes, animal noises, gunfire, and a specially written theme song for use in the showcase strobe maze. All in all, it was a huge and very enjoyable project, requiring lots of planning, creativity, logistics and system planning. As GNG currently specialise in temporary installations, all of the systems are custom built for each event, which means as well as the writing and recording there is usually a fair bit of complex wiring work onsite. As the Magna show was huge and in a space with only two 32A outlets, even getting power around the venue to the 6 PA systems and satellite speakers systems was a major challenge. In all about 3500 people experienced Hybrid-X and we had a great response to the environment we had created.

In just over a week, from March 24th-27th, GNG are taking over a building in Whitby Shambles on the N Yorkshire coast. This event is called Killers Live and charts the story of a secret facility run by the same slightly shady organisation that were behind Hybrid-X, Dominions Corporation. This facility, instead of hybridising humans and animals to produce super soldiers, is investigating the weaponisation potential of serial killers. Our visitors will walk thru the facility and observe some of the most notorious fiends Dominions has captured, and will be allowed to study them at very close quarters…… what could possibly go wrong???? :-)

Killers Live is a generally smaller scale event than Hybrid, featuring a smaller number of rooms and less peripheral environment, but the challenges are just as interesting. Though they give a pretty free creative rein, GNG provide an entertaining brief document, including the theatrical story of the walkthru and character profiles of the actors visitors will meet on their trip round.

Most of the environmental sounds for this project will be backed by the always interesting Omnisphere virtual instrument from Spectrasonics. Omnisphere is exceptional for providing very very long evolving textures that can be gently moved around over the course of a 10-15min loop without ever becoming stale or overly familiar. The ability to select patches by genre and tone makes finding inspiration really quick and you spend far more time generating the soundscape rather than wading through hundreds of sounds. Every patch is useable, and there no padding in the instrument at all. The new OmniTR control system on the iPad also makes live mixing and variation of a palette of Omnisphere sounds very straightforward. It generates beds that are really easy to find spaces in for foley or speech elements.

Because of the how well rounded out the characters are in the brief, there is lots of scope for variation in the foley creation. In Killers, each of the bad boys has a unique slant. We have a couple of occultic obsessed ones, a surgeon, and my personal favourite, a workshop based DIY obsessed loony I like to call Bubba. One of the things I find quite useful to do when I’m creating long ‘roomscapes’ is to tell a story, even if it’s only one that I wil understand. for me, it helps to give some structure to the soundscape and stop it from becoming too repetitive. I have to bear in mind that aactor is going to live with this soundscape for 12hrs a day for 4 days and so I want there to be lots of variation to stop it driving them bonkers themselves!

Bubba has been locked away in his workshop prison for many years, and in that time has made a friend, Sparky the Generator. Sparky however is hopelessly unreliable and exists really only to provide power to the drills and saws Bubba uses to fix Sparky. The hopeless futility of this viscous circle is lost on Bubba after all these years. Sparky also has a habit of gently electrocuting Bubba at frequent intervals, something which is driving him evermore doolally. At some points, Sparky grinds to a halt altogether which leads to much consternation in Bubba and frantic hammering, drilling and general Sparky abuse to get him going again. But restart it does, Bubba let’s out a slightly self satisfied grunt and the whole sorry saga carries on again.

Unlike film, creating soundscapes for these sorts of events requires you to think ahead a little and hope the actor in the environment is going to go with it. you don’t have the luxury of visuals to work on, most of the finishing scenery and props are not worked out finally till we get access to the site a few days before so getting the soundscape right for room tone and size is a little bit of a leap of faith. But GNG are open-minded enough to often work the other way round and let the created soundscape sometimes drive the final finished environment as well as the other way round.

Bubba’s roomscape therefore has a more of less constant Sparky bed (until the fateful breakdowns!), hammering, drilling, sparks, Jacobs ladders, grindings and of course Bubba himself. The whole scape is about 8 channels of fx: Sparky and Bubba are 2, then layered hammerings and drillings (being careful to remember that Bubba can only really do one thing at a time!) on 2 channels, a bit of room ambience on another channel, and the breakdown treatments on another. I use Digital pErformer as my creation platform of choice. I can edit really quickly, fine tune fades and start/stop points really easily while the transport head is moving and save on the fly. It’s really become very capable for this sort of job since v5, though the current v7.2 is a blistering update.

I’ve been an avid experimenter with the principle of visual mixing ever since reading David Gibson’s book The Art of Visual Mixing, where the author advocates thinking about mixes in purely visual positioning terms, particularly important now with surround mixes. I really like this way of working for soundscapes, even to the extent of drawing sketches of the environment on paper and assigning values to position on the sketch. If you’ve never tried it, it’s actually quite a fun way of working and keeps you focussed during construction. Rather than using automated mixing for this type of job, I will after dedicate a track to a position and process that track to the position it exists in (assuming it’s not a moving object), hence Bubba and Sparky can have their own dedicated positional channel. Little level changes I actually process into the individual soundbites themselves (really easy in DP and non-destructive).

DP’s built in ProVerb is actually quite flexible now and features some nice impulses for room creation and sound shaping, so most of the channels are fed in varying degrees (again dictated by the objects place in the sketch) to a single room specified reverb.

One of the more fun aspects of the GNG events is there is usually one more ‘unrealistic’ room which is very cinematic for the visitors and features the event ‘theme’; typically a custom written piece of hard rock or intense techno, with pounding kits and heavy guitars. This piece of music becomes the unofficial theme tune of each event and hey are always fun to write and play as it gives me a chance to just go nuts on the heaviness and wig out a bit, great fun after the intensity of prepping the roomscapes. Killers Live has a really heavy thrash metal track, running to about 5 minutes and non looping for the actor to chase the visitors out of the final room, the theme still ringing in their ears!

If you want to hear Bubba’s story, the Razor room, the Surgeon, The Coven and The Lair, then come along to Killers Live at Whitby Shambles, 24th-27th of March 2011. Scare you there!