Working Digitally with Vocals from Movement

By Zara

Having explored moving to similar noises from different animals, although this inspired the creation of material, we decided to work with one wild animal genus for creating the final music track, and used lynx noises. Sapphira and I had decided to record audio samples where I was imitating lynx vocalisations, to blend with the recorded sounds of the lynxes in the final track, as described in the previous article. I performed motifs I had created in response to my movement research and experimented with what noises I would make to accompany these, or more rather what noises I would make as the creature I was embodying and whilst moving in this way. This spawned the creation of new vocal motifs that I delivered in recordings, that carried the characterisation and emotion behind the movement I had developed.

The screenshot below shows an early assembly of what I will call the music work. Files described as ‘Lynx groaning’ and ‘transition’ are recordings of my vocalisations and other files are lynx recordings obtained via online media. The track described as ‘MusicElementsReturn’ was material returned by the film’s sound editor, who delivered edited music tracks prior to the film’s sound edit, helping us to consider the feel and tone of the edited tracks before choosing how to develop the music composition and before the film was made.