top of page

Walk to Beach: Acousmatic Sound Design Project

  • Writer: Umut Yelbaşı
    Umut Yelbaşı
  • Feb 22
  • 5 min read

Updated: Mar 5

You can listen to the final audio track from the player, and read my critical commentary below.


Technical details: Stereo, 44.1 kHz, 24 bits per sample 


WALK TO BEACH

Walk to Beach is an acousmatic electroacoustic composition in stereo also suitable for playback on quadraphonic speaker setups. It is envisioned and designed to be played on headphones but has no strict prerequisite regarding how it is presented. All sounds in the composition were recorded or digitally produced by me.


The composition is inspired by a very specific childhood memory – a hotel’s walking path from our room to the beach. I wanted to base my composition around a very distinct sound I remember hearing during those walks: mourning dove calls.  


PRODUCTION AND INSPIRATION

Early in the project planning stage, I discovered Natasha Barrett’s acousmatic composition work, Red Snow. The way it was formed and the meanings behind the decisions felt similar to my plans, although slightly more abstract. 


In her description of Red Snow, Barrett says she has “attempted to concentrate the beauty and violence of a natural landscape into the 'microclimate' of the work - forming a new 'organisational space' yet reflecting, in acoustic form, the natural world and source inspiration.” Red Snow acts like the audio representation of a terrarium that she feels she’s inside of. She also says the piece is “structurally balanced, not in a symmetrical sense, but through the 'life' of one articulation resulting in a subsequent and counterbalancing reaction,” which is what I set out to achieve. (Barrett, 2002) I wanted to find the balance between using completely natural or literal sounds with minimal modifications and sounds that are also natural but modified heavily to be used in new contexts, and perhaps as metaphors of concepts or situations. The sounds have width, but the constant envelope fluctuations signify approaching a boundary that can’t be crossed. 


One such example is the drone-like sound that’s present until a little over halfway through the composition, which is meant to evoke the feeling of sea being present but not visible, so it isn’t a direct sound of the sea – it’s the sound of a water tap running, with the beginning and the end cut out to get the middle bit, stretched from the beginning of the project until where the audio clip was intended to end. The result was an abstract sound which still has some connotations of water flow, but mostly serves as a bed for all the other sound effects that build on top of it, combined with an ambience recording with surround quadraphonic panning automation (as well as granular synthesis and EQ). 


To indicate a reverse flow of time, I reversed the crowd sound files, then applied spatialisation automations to both beds to blend them better. There is minimal additional processing, so the human element is still discernible, but any sound that’s being made (including laughter) sounds unnatural, out of place, and otherworldly. There is also a very subtle granular synthesis processing on the crowd noise which adds texture and acts as another barrier between the listener and the real world.


The ambience recording stays in the same spatial position for the first half of the composition but starts travelling after the second half. This is done through surround panning, and aims to evoke the sense of travel, or aimless wandering, through its seemingly random pans to different directions, and with the high-cut filter taking out anything below 176 Hz, the ambience that’s already been placed far away from the listener becomes even more directionless. In the Computer Music Journal’s Vol.2 No.2 edition, Curtis Road concludes his article titled Introduction to Granular Synthesis by stating that “granular synthesis adds a set of distinct and interesting colours and textures to the palette of sounds made available by digital technology.” What the granular synthesis helps to do in this situation with a high fade-in and low fade-out is give the ambience a pulsating effect which gives a texture to an otherwise “normal” recording. 


First, non-musical sounds were selected from my pre-existing library of self-recorded sounds. I specifically steered clear of musical instruments or any melodic sounds as I felt it would take away from the immersion.


All sounds have been manipulated inside REAPER, using native and third-party plug-ins. At least one plug-in in the GRM Tools collection has been applied to each layer in the composition to adjust everything from resonant frequencies to spatial behaviours, with the intention of merging sounds so that no single sound would stick out (apart from the bird call) – all sounds come together to build a soundscape, and any movement within that soundscape happens as one change that effects all layers instead of singular changes.


Any motivation for sound manipulation was conceptual, such as the extremely slowed-down sound of a water tap running. In the composition, this signifies the sea behind obstacles, which we end up reaching towards the second half.


I wanted to avoid repetition as much as possible, so I decided to add randomised fluctuations to sounds by running them through GRM Tools’s Doppler, Delays, Shuffler, Freeze Stereo, Comb Stereo, and Reson effects. Initially these plugins weren’t selected consciously – they were applied one by one to each track and once the result was close enough to the desired effect, they were left alone. 


The beginning of the second half opens with a downward Shepard glissando, which was created by putting the whistle/mourning dove clip through a sampler, adding EQ, copying it twice (one for higher octave the other for lower octave), and finally automating the volumes of the layers. The glissando acts as a gateway between two timeless spaces, and they will independently exist in their own worlds, but the listener is now travelling from one to the other.


REFLECTION

Alongside the Shepard glissando, I considered adding a Risset Rhythm to create rhythmic ambiguity but later scrapped the idea as creating the Shepard glissando with a recorded sample proved more difficult than expected. The techniques I’ve used were personally challenging and new, but I believe I’ve managed to adapt to them.


I believe the composition evokes a sense of nostalgia within an atmosphere that feels unreal. Convolution could have been utilised more, especially to support the sense of timelessness, however, overall, the composition has mostly reached the point I wanted to bring it.



REFERENCES
bottom of page