© copyright SHOP / Neil Harris

Recording & Post-Production

Recording

Our recording took place at Yanley Court, a complimentary therapy centre in Long Ashton, Bristol. The upper hall wasn't a conventional recording environment, but the rock and wood surfaces and vaulted ceiling meant the space had an musically appropriate acoustic. More importantly it was was somewhere that Monika had performed in many times before and was a comfortable environment to be in. Our intention was to capture a range of expressions of the gongs and singing bowls to provide a palette of sounds for composition in higher order ambisonics later in post-production. In all honesty, I had never appreciated the sound of gongs before this project and indeed the challenge they present in recording.

Gongs are complex emitters of sound consisting of many interacting harmonic overtones often described as multi-timbral. The expression of a gong is unlike any other instrument and its tone and timbre changes and evolves dramatically based on the performance technique (e.g. struck, rubbed, scraped, rolled), the beater or excitation material (rubber, cotton, wood, metal) and your spatial relationship to them in terms of proximity and room position. Gong baths as a practice and sonic phenomenon go beyond any conventional western musical experience such as in orchestral arrangements. Instead the gong or gongs are performed with a focus on embodied and pyschological experience. Performance strategies can vary but notabily instead of a traditional stage based perspective, the gongs are often moved around the audience and at close proximity. Literally and metaphorically immersing and washing the audience in waves of deep, rich, complex, and evolving sound.

This was the first time we had recorded gongs and a little research on the subject yielded a rabbit hole of approaches on best practices. From a recording perspective we wanted an approach that yielded flexibility but with a set-up that was easy to transport, set-up and simple enough to not over complicate the post-production. We wanted to capture both the spatial element of the room with a rich and varied tone at different distances including close proximity.

We positioned the gong off centre in the room and at a 45° angle to nearby walls and placed a carpet on the floor in front in the hope to temper the influence of the room mode and immediate reflections. Using a SoundField ST450-ii we could capture an ambisonic recording at distance (~9ft) for a room sound which we might decode to different virtual mics or use as an ambisonic fill later. At a mid-distance (~3ft) a Neuman U87 large diapraghm condenser set to a cardioid polar pattern for a more traditional whole gong sound with a focused perspective, quiet noise floor and full, flat frequency response. Finally at close proximity (~1ft), off axis and near the rim an Electrovoice RE20 dynamic microphone to capture initial impacts and surface sound at potentially high sound pressure levels. Final mic positions were based on auditioning in the space and over headphones. The singing bowls were recorded in a similar manner. The recorder used was a ZoomF8 and Sony MDR-7506 headphones.

Post-Production

Neil and Arty at SHOP wanted to generate some of their visuals procedurally from the audio, meaning our composition came first. In the earliest stages of the project it wasn't clear if it would be a 360 film, a procedurally generative VR experience or something shown in a event space. It might use VR headsets, or run in game engines, or be mapped onto a multichannel speaker system. The end result would be something between all of the above.

We began arranging the material with a into a Reaper session creating simple stereo mock-up to explore the shape and direction of the audio. Neil took these and layered and processed his own versions with pitchshifting which we would then later rebuild from raw recordings, and develop further before spatialising.

We decided this would be an opportunity to test the limits of ambisonic post-production and would create a session in 7th Order using 64 channel busses and a range of plugins from IEM with edit and arrangement techniques to layer, modulate and develop the performance recordings.

© Planterium at We The Curious, 2022 Photo by Nicholas Allan Innes on Unsplash

Exhibition

Surrender premiered at the 2019 Simple Things festival in Bristol, UK. It was shown as a full dome 180° video in the iconic Planetarium of We The Curious to a sell out crowd.

The audio was presented as a 7.1 decode of the Higher Order Ambisonic mix using an IEM All-RAD decoder profile based on the exact speaker layout angles provided by the planetarium.

The mix produced included a wide dynamic range and was set to target a conventional loudness spec based on EBU-R128. The presentation team took it upon themselves to add additional gain to the playback chain on performance without consultation causing distortion and significant resonance in the planetarium's hemi-spherical room design. A factor to take into account in future full-dome environments.

I'm always open to new collaborations, consultancy, projects and research ideas - just reach out via my work email:

• luke.reed@uwe.ac.uk