The Project: Virus, project 2.

The Purpose:

to translate the action of a virus infecting a host into an aural form.

The Process:

I began by writing a musical loop on my guitar.  I processed the loop as a regular musical element, playing it in a chain as follows: from my guitar, through my jmp-1 preamp, through my pod xt live effects processor, through my el34 power amp, and finally miked from the speaker cabinet.  This was then taken into my computer, where I expanded the loop in Garageband.  I duplicated it several times, so that I could effect it in different ways.  I sent the signal in a loop from the computer, through my pod xt live, through my sampler and back into the computer.  I used this setup to layer effects upon each other, creating a myriad of tracks, from which I would later effect further using software such as Garageband and audacity.  Realizing that I needed to simulate an attack on each individual note, I used a software piano to record the same loop, and then I split each note and ran them through the same process as before, but using different effects for each one.

I did the effects in stages to represent the different stages of infection.  The introduction of the virus can be heard in the whispering wind sound that comes in – a sound file I introduced separately into the soundscape.  The following stages were all achieved using the initial loop and the virus sound, signifying that all of the changes are done in the symbiosis between the virus and host.  Stage two – the infection setting in – was done by using slight effects, such as pitch shifting and modulation.  The third stage – multiplication – is where the separation of the notes was particularly important.  I needed to show that the virus was multiplying – to do this, I employed panning and delay effects to the increasingly infected notes of the loops, representing an aural spread.  I used similar effects to represent the virus (though, in addition to the multiplication, the infection became quite stronger; which I achieved by using phasing, modulation, slight distortion, more extreme pitch-shifting, etc.).  The next stage came in the form of extreme degeneration of the host – done using extreme bit-crushing, distortion, pitch-shifting, slowed tempo, layers upon layers of innumerable effects, and tweaked delay.  The final stage comes in the form of a new being – one which does not represent the original loop/host in the least.  This stage was meant to represent the metamorphosis of the host into something unrecognizable, under the duress of hosting the virus – an indistinguishable bond between the two.