Having spent some time layering the visual elements of the film I returned to the soundscape. I have been working on (and thinking about) it without making much meaningful progress, I still feel that there is a missing element the aspects that I have tried so far have seemed to get further from what I have been trying to achieve.

I tried a stream of consciousness approach that I recorded whilst stuck in traffic commuting home (before lockdown. That wasn’t successful, I even ran it through transcription software but it didn’t produce anything useful.

I tried a few more versions of the synthesised voice approach as I noted previously the difficultly was finding words to put into have read by the voice.

Reading it out myself did not help at all. Those recording as never getting airtime.

I wasn’t at all confident about this area of exploration so I went back to working on an abstract soundscape. I was looking for an approach that addressed the bleak oppressiveness of the drone.

Listening to Hannah Peel’s Mary Casio: Journey to Cassiopeia puts me into the emotional and intellectual space that has inspired my work. But music is a expressive art-form in its own right, if the soundscape is too musical it feels like a crutch, will it put audience members into an active engaged position?

I am also still interested in the process of sonification and have worked on a few pieces with the the process that I used for Kino.

One of the pieces that I feel has moved further towards something that is useful was a an outcome of time processing a drum loop driven by a function.

I have continued to layer the new sounds with the older drones and worked to incorporate more natural sounds (rain, birds wings, breathing, snoring children). I have continued to use the process inspired by Jon Hopkins of mixing down and destructively working over the top of past versions. This gives me the sense of moving forwards (even if the end result is very similar).

The next step needs to be to return to voices.