Sound

To decide what sort of sounds I wanted to use in my soundscape, I spent some time looking at my painting and imagining what sort of sounds you would hear. I thought about just having screams in the background but I thought that would be too sort of in your face, so I thought about more subtle things I could use.

In my mind I view the character in the chair as somehow having been corrupted, the way thats he's screaming while the light falls on him. I suppose another way of looking at it would be that he's a person of light with dark falling on him and he's screaming because of that. Either way I got vibes of wrongdoing from this guy, and so I wanted to show this in my work.

I was able to record the sound of rain one afternoon, you can only hear it faintly, but that combined with the faint sounds of birds represents something of what perhaps the Pope used to be, it's a fresh, hopeful, renewing sound, and in my piece it will be very suppressed in the background and difficult to distinguish.

I wanted to get the sound of chains somewhere in the piece as I could imagine the man somehow being trapped, and unable to escape his torment, so I used a ring that I have with three parts, that's quite heavy and I was able to get from it a sound that was similar to that of chains clinking.

I did want something similar to screaming - but not. I wanted to add something that would tie the piece together and just give it that edge, making it eerie and uncomfortable to listen to. I didn't have anything of my own that would make the noise I desired, so using a sound effects website called 'Sounddogs' I downloaded a free sound effect off nails on a chalkboard. This sounded perfect for what I wanted.