_The international week 2022 hosted by FH JOANNEUM was an interesting event. I attended Luis Daniel Martínez Álvarez workshop (#9) called “Aesthetic Echoes of Terror: Construction of the sound Atmospheres of the Uncanny Valley for Videogames and Cinema”. I tried to gather as many thoughts as possible here in this post.
I will start with a short summary of the workshop; the lecturer was Danny from Mexico, and his profession is sound design combined with storytelling – mainly scary stories. He gave us a deep dive in how and why specific sonic patterns appear frightening to us, and how to fabricate such experiences. It was a fascinating topic with even better insights, even for a person like me, which has little experience with sound design. We then went on and collectively wrote a little horror story inspired by our deepest fears; the result was “No-Scream//Nose-Cream”. It’s about a hellish clown, which steals noses while the whole world is falling into the hands of ice cream zombies. Sounds like a weird, and that’s because how it was created: We took a piece of paper, and everybody wrote one sentence and then handed the paper to the next person, to continue the story from this point. This approach created this fever dream of a story within two passes.
After that was done, we then collected a vast array of different sounds of noises in the city, grabbed a Zoom-Recorder and ventured into the city to record said noises. We spent the whole first Day in the city, listening to various sound emitters and recorded those. The goal was to generate a composition for our scary story with these sounds, and so we searched up different places with different atmospheres (like a church) and collected enough sound samples to accommodate every detail of our story.
As I mentioned before, I’m not a sound designer – although I enlisted for this specific workshop because of my previous occupations; game design and cinema enthusiast. The attentive reader might remember that I recently wrote a blog post about how some colleagues and me did an attempt on creating a horror game in unity. So, it was an easy decision for me, what workshop to attend when I read the possible options. I wanted to learn more about the soundscapes of the horror genre and how they are made, and I was not dissatisfied.
But one little hiccup which me (an interaction designer) and a colleague (a media designer) faced, was the fact that we were both a little out of our fields here. So, as we now had all our sounds together, we had to quickly learn an audio software (through an excellent crash curse by Danny) and get to composing – something none of both of us ever did. The tasks for this week were to create two compositions; one for our story and one where we did the score for a little 60 second snippet of a horror movie/series/etc of our choice.
We were both thrown into cold water in a workshop with no prior knowledge of its topics, having no clue of composing and trying to figure out baby steps in this field. Naturally, the sound designers did a task which took as nearly two Days in under 10 minutes and it the results sounded amazing. This was kind of demoralizing to be honest, but it was nice to see what can be achieved when you profile in this topic. To not be completely emotionally destroyed we settled on the taking-part-medal, and just played and experimented around with the sounds, and although our lacking skill had interesting outcomes. Although we had little to no experience, we had great fun and really enjoyed ourselves. Turns out, it’s not always about being good in something from the get-go, but it’s about committing and having fun on the way.
All in All, it was an interesting and wonderful experience and I want to commit some special words to our lecturer, Danny – a wonderful and friendly guy from Mexico who studied music and composition. He knew a great deal about his topics and had great fun in relaying all those information to us; but I think what made the week such a success for our group was his inviting and open personality. If I could rate Danny as a lecturer, I’d give him a 10/10 – it was an absolute blast.
