Basic Idea/Inspiration/Premise etc.
In one of my classes, we had listened to an NPR interview with Dr. Diana Deutsch who studies alot of interesting phenominon in regards to the human voice, musical illusion etc.
Being an audio guy, I thought this was really interesting, especially the introduction in which the phrase fragment
"sometimes behaves so strangely,"
upon repetition, appears to have a strong melody which jumps out at the listener.
In this project, I tried to investigate this phenominon further by recording a fuller conversation and trying to find the melody within the speech patterns through accompanyment from my guitar playing.
Dr Diana Deutsch's webpage(clicky) NPR story, "Perfect Pitch"(clicky)
Initially I recorded about 30 minutes worth of random converstaion with a friend. This step was done in the protools rooms in the first floor basement of CMB. I then selected segments of the conversations and edited down my material to three segments.
backpack.mp3
is a condensed version of my friends communist backpack story,
doneyetConvo.mp3
is segments of conversation where my friend and I talk about my project, recording issues, etc. and
randomConvo.mp3
basically contains the story of my roommate Najad, as well as other bits and pieces which I couldn't classify.
After editing down the segements, I went back home, transfered the files onto my computer and tried to select a piece to play on the guitar. Eventually I decided upon using the story of my roommate Najad on the randomConvo file.
This is where the hard part began...
Initially I tried to listen to the whole 22 second peice and play along with it on my guitar. It took basically an hour before I realized that I wasn't anywhere near the skill to pull that kind stunt off...
I then settled on trying the break the story into fragments of a few words and then try to follow along those segments with the guitar...
Well another hour or so plodding along and I had managed to accomplish nothing as each segement was still too complex and fast for my ear to discern the notes and translate to fretted strings of the guitar neck.
Eventually I realized that I needed a much more clear and simple guide track to follow with the guitar, so I recorded my self humming along with the various fragments of the story.
Basically I would select a portion of the story, loop that fragment of audio, try to find the notes being spoken and punch in several takes of me humming the notes that I heard. This process was very tedious and slow as I would get fustrated trying to find the notes being spoken, often taking over half an hour just to get a rough melody of a one or two second fragment...
After this guide track was layed out, the guitar tracked followed very quickly, taking a little over an hour to figure out each segment on the guitar and through the same method, loop and punch in several takes of that segment
The Story , The Guide Track and The Guitar
The Story and Guide Track
The Guitar and Guide Track
The Story, Guide Track and Guitar
After recording the guitar takes, it was just a matter of selecting the best guitar preformance takes, editing that together into a continuous piece and then composing the project into a whole composition.
I recorded a scratch track of random guitar wanking and overlayed that portion with segements from doneYetConvo piece, serving as an intro. Afterwards I just cleaned up the piece, adding some eq, delay and reverb to the guitar track, making the guitar sound larger, but also pushing it back into the mix and "brightend" the vocal track by pushing the high end frequencies up with eqing.
Overall I thought the project turned out well into terms of sound quality, but in comparison with the Dr. Deutsch piece, the melody of a whole conversation seems much more atonal and random, although still interesting.
Final Mix
Mix with No Processing, etc.
This is my poor man's recording setup ^^