Yellow Red Blue, final sound piece

What drew me towards Yellow Red Blue by Wassily Kandinsky was the abstractions that he used to create a piece that doesn't (on the surface at least) reflect any real world scenarios or events. I thought this would be the best painting to explore how feelings of enlightenment or serenity would sound like as the other paintings felt too boxed in with what their artists were depicting and therefore restricted what I could make as an experimental sound piece. When I look at Yellow Red Blue, I can tell that Kandinsky would've most likely experimented with some psychedelic substances in the past to create such abstract and colourful imagery.

So with my sound piece I wanted to create an ethereal sounding atmosphere and then use my own voice to layer over the atmosphere to create a hybrid between atmosphere piece and a short song. What I ended up with tells the chemical narrative you experience when you take drugs. You start with the calming effect but then your mind starts to question whether or not this was a good idea and the paranoia starts to kick in. But then comes the enlightening stage where the high has washed over you and different neural pathways are opening for the first time, achieving feelings and epiphanies that previously were not attainable.

To portray this narrative arc I wanted the sound piece to start off quietly and with a stable tempo, achieved by using the prismiser I programmed to harmonise the intake of my breath as an A major chord. This breath is repeated throughout the song to remind the viewer that this is all happening within the brain of someone who has just experimented with a new substance. The next sound to be introduced is reversed springtime birdsong. I chose to use this as I wanted to experiment with an artistic representation of the 'flow of thought'. With this I wanted to use a waterfall sound effect (for the 'flow') but felt that wasn't experimental enough so instead found that reversed birdsong when mapped to a MIDI keyboard and played repeatedly with variable pitches (so the different notes would come out at different speeds) created a cool cascading effect.

For the rest of the song my voice takes the stage as the main sound. For a long time I've wanted to experiment with using a vocal effect that Kanye West and Bon Iver use call the Prismiser and thought that this unit would be the perfect time to try it out. So I spent a whole day acquiring all the software I'd need (I have just built a new PC so needed to start fresh with all music software). The software I went with was FL Studio 12 and Antares harmony engine. I have made a video about how I rerouting the MIDI's output to configure to my voice here, as explaining it in text is convoluted.



I also watched an hour long beginners tutorial for FL Studio 12 as its UI, shortcuts and nuances are different from Logic Pro X, which is what I'm used to. I found the tutorial very useful and wrote up some notes from the course so I could look back on them the next time I'm troubled by the software.



After the vocals reach their climax (representing paranoia peaking) the bird song cuts out (background noise disappearing and clearing of the mind) and the viewers inner voice says a couplet using the prismiser to poetically denote the feeling of an enlightening high with:
'I'm awake, in a dream.
In the brightest light you'll never see'

For a first attempt with FL Studio 12 and also considering that there isn't a definitive prismiser tutorial on YouTube, meaning I had to work out some of the new software through trial and (a lot of) error, I'm quite pleased with how my sound piece turned out. I was kinda rushed towards the end and was starting to get frustrated with FL Studio so didn't have the time or patience to go back and tweak some of the voices that are out of time and also do a proper mix on the vocal channels.
Nevertheless I'm sure I'll continue to hone my knowledge of FL Studio 12 and am glad I took this unit as a chance to initiate that.


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