In preparation for the Halloween season, I would like to share several suspenseful pieces that I have been working on for some time. The Forebodings for electronics (stereophonic playback) began with the desire to experiment with and distort different timbres of the piano: both on the keyboard and inside of the instrument. I settled on the title “Foreboding,” a term meaning the dreadful feeling that something bad will occur, after creating and listening to the first piece created from 2017 to 2019. The Forebodings mostly involved improvising on the piano and editing the tracks by using programs like Audacity and Lexis Audio Editor to add multiple effects: things like applying “Echo,” “Reverb,” and “Reverse” to give the music a more unsettling quality. The CD-ROMantic smartphone application also enabled me to add more depth to “Foreboding II” and “Foreboding III” by altering the speed through “Vaporwave Effect” feature.[1]
The final track created this month, “Foreboding IV,” deviates from the piano soundscape to focus on synthesized tones via the Arpio application. I altered the arpeggiation to bend the pitches by shaking my smartphone from side to side while recording the music. I then distorted this music by applying “Reverse,” “Reverb,” and “Echo” at different increments of delay from roughly one-thousand milliseconds to five-thousand milliseconds. I later ran the track through CD-ROMantic to change the speed and add more “Reverb” The end result produces a cluster of simultaneous sounds meant to convey the fear of the unknown, or that something does not feel quite right.
The final track created this month, “Foreboding IV,” deviates from the piano soundscape to focus on synthesized tones via the Arpio application. I altered the arpeggiation to bend the pitches by shaking my smartphone from side to side while recording the music. I then distorted this music by applying “Reverse,” “Reverb,” and “Echo” at different increments of delay from roughly one-thousand milliseconds to five-thousand milliseconds. I later ran the track through CD-ROMantic to change the speed and add more “Reverb” The end result produces a cluster of simultaneous sounds meant to convey the fear of the unknown, or that something does not feel quite right.
These tracks represent efforts in trying to maintain attention to sonic detail. There are those, however, who have expanded beyond the compositional techniques that I have described to incorporate something entirely new. I recently came across a device called the Apprehension Engine at the suggestion of a commenter on YouTube. Created as a collaboration between Canadian film score composer Mark Korven[2] and instrument maker Tony Duggan-Smith, the Apprehension Engine consists of a wooden box combined with parts from musical instruments (like the guitar and hurdy gurdy) with found objects (like rulers and other pieces of metal) and electrical wiring for special effects. It is a very versatile contraption used specifically for horror films, and there are many tutorial videos that both show and explain how to build an Apprehension Engine at home. One such video series consists of twenty-four episodes revealing the history and construction process behind this instrument.
[1] I have previously used the CD-ROMantic app to create a digital musical album that combines original tracks that I created this year with the 1980s and 90s postmodern musical aesthetic of Vaporwave popularized in the 2010s.
[2] Mark Korven is best known for his music to horror movies like The Witch (2015), The Lighthouse (2019), and The Black Phone (2022). The latest film is currently available on the Peacock streaming service from NBC/Universal.
[1] I have previously used the CD-ROMantic app to create a digital musical album that combines original tracks that I created this year with the 1980s and 90s postmodern musical aesthetic of Vaporwave popularized in the 2010s.
[2] Mark Korven is best known for his music to horror movies like The Witch (2015), The Lighthouse (2019), and The Black Phone (2022). The latest film is currently available on the Peacock streaming service from NBC/Universal.
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