A Walk Home - Sound VR (2021)

Exploring Virtual Reality with Sound

This project was made concurrently with my undergraduate capstone, which was a virtual reality experience. A major part, in my mind, of “selling” virutal reality - making a VR world believable - is creating an immersive sound experience. This is an exercise in that mode.

This work is inspired by experiences I have had walking home late at night painfully sober. Living near a lot of bars and college houses, a late night walk reveals a terrifying scene of what “having fun” ends up looking like. Things get messy, fights break out, and you walk by and wonder if it is all worth it.

In assembling the work in Audition, I began by deciding what side of the street the listener was walking down, and putting cars passing on one side, the right, and the early beats and conversations on the other. This created, through fade ins and fade outs, a pretty convincing illusion of walking down the street at night, with bars full of people and traffic going by. In a middle section of the work, the listener encounters a ranting man who they cannot get around. To make his confrontation and ranting more impactful and direct, I faded in a flange and oscillated his voice back and forth between the two headphone sides to simulate looking for a way around him.

Structurally, the concept of quality of tone and noise from Stockhausen’s four principles of electronic music was something I had not considered before, as I made sure to block out frequency ranges and place sounds into them, so that the music could sit in the more bass region, the walking in higher frequencies, and voices in the middle. I also was reminded of environmental soundscapes discussed in the previous sound cultures class, such as Hildegard Westerkamp’s Into India, and the way in which it uses mixing and repetition to develop a hyper real sonic reality.