Sound Scripts
The Bottom End of Cinema: Low Frequency Effects in Soundtrack Composition
Abstract
In January 2004 I journeyed to Antarctica as an Antarctica New Zealand Honorary Artist Fellow. My proposed study was entitled Sounds of Antarctica and entailed producing a portfolio of original compositions. The attraction of the planet’s last great wilderness for me was to a large degree the challenge of how one translates such a limited visual palette into sound. In this paper I will explore how an environment of sensory deprivation can influence and shape one’s work and how a creative artist can find a productive solution to the issue of transcribing such diverse elements as landscape, history, colour (or absence thereof) and natural phenomena (such as wind) into a satisfying musical and poetic form. I conclude that through the study of this distant, frozen, inhospitable land, my creativity has paradoxically moved into a very fertile stage. It was not, as I first thought, the wide, majestic vistas that later fuelled my compositions but the play of light and the effects of a limited colour palette. Nevertheless, it is perhaps because of the wide horizons that I have been thinking horizontally in a linear fashion rather than vertically. The vastness of the panorama is also the reason for focusing on the small details close at hand.
Recommended Citation
Hope, C.
(2009).
The Bottom End of Cinema: Low Frequency Effects in Soundtrack Composition.
Sound Scripts, 2(1).
Retrieved from
https://ro.ecu.edu.au/soundscripts/vol2/iss1/14
