Brainstorming:
When the soundscape project was introduced to us I immediately set my mind on creating a psychedelic track. I’ve always been very interested in psychedelic music and its ability to influence the brain which is why I wanted to further explore it.
Psychedelic music is defined as music that attempts to replicate and/or enhance the mind-altering experiences of psychedelic drugs. Psychedelic music has taught me the power sounds hold, for example, some people even report that it has allowed their spiritual being to expand and develop while others report experiencing visual and auditory hallucinations, synesthesia and altered states of consciousness.
Originally I wanted to create music inspired by Glass Animals (a band that borrows sounds from nature and uses it to create a psychedelic effect in their music). Unfortunately, I failed at doing so. I decided to do further research into what hearing sounds like for a drug user. According to the research I did, I got the following responses:
- Imagine you’re in a giant concert hall or any large room just by yourself. This hall is traveling through space at the speed of light and you’re just an observer. In front of you is a giant orchestra with hundreds of members each representing a different sound in a track. While listening you can feel as if you can hear literally every single sound at once, each feeling as if the detail in it’s complexity is infinite and perfect. Now imagine the whole room is your brain/consciousness and that each sound can shape the room resulting in your thoughts changing. The music can feel as if it represents a whole new history timeline with each sound being some major event happening in it.
- Your hearing goes in and out, sometimes the pitch of voices goes higher and lower for me. At one point they started to sound robotic, with their voice pitch oscillating up and down. To me I get it as echos, and the echos layer up so fast that it starts to be unintelligible sometimes and people taking will just sound like random noises.
- Something like electricity buzzing. A lot of the time the sound Im hearing (music or people talking) will start to become disjointed and segmented.
Audio Collection:
I decided that I will create an audio narrative of a day in the life of an individual on LSD, as I read that the effects can last up to 12 hours. I collected sounds that narrate a daily routine and formed a composition using them. In order to imitate the effect of LSD I manipulated pitches, distorted noises, and reversed tracks. In order to explore space and time, I manipulated the rates of the track, the panning of the tracks, the delays of the track, and finally edited it in a manner that sounds like it’s being played in a hall.
Final Track:
