Music

Designing musical content

Musical content are all the elements in your soundtrack that serve a musical purpose. How to exactly define music is a discussion that could go on beyond the end of times. So let’s not get caught up in that too much and see what this musical purpose could be for our soundwalks. We just stated that narrative content tells a story, so we could counter this by stating that the musical elements most often do not literally tell the story but bring context, atmosphere or add a lyrical or emotional layer. It can also simply be a matter of attention: after a certain amount of spoken word a little break with a different kind of focus might be needed. Or it can for example be the sign for a time lapse or a change of perspective in the story as we just set out.

Music is extremely powerful. If you don’t have much experience yet using music as an underscore to something you might want to try the following small experiment: find or make a recording of someone reading a poem or a monologue without any form of underscore. Now try very different kinds of music playing at the same time as the recorded text. Preferably instrumental of course because of speech intelligibility but otherwise as diverse as possible, from techno to classical to a film score to salsa or klezmer or dub reggae. You will notice how this changes the mood and perhaps even your interpretation of the spoken word very much, and often within a split second.

How music does this can take a long time to explain and is not undisputed or even completely clear - but there is no doubt about the ability of music to convey strong emotions or moods in almost anyone, both on conscious and subconscious levels. That being said, there are other elements of your story that can be told through music. For example for a story set in the 1960s nothing can evoke that era as quickly as a bit of well-chosen music. And the soundscape of a nightclub might be recognizable first and foremost by the kind of music playing in the background. The kind of radio station or streaming playlist heard in the background can for example also be a strong hint to the social class of a household featured in your story.

Like we just hinted at by mentioning the trouble of giving a definition of music there is a big grey area between sound and music. Also it’s important that music is a cultural phenomenon and very basic concepts like scales and rhythms can be very different from culture to culture. Still whatever culture or cultures you are in, and wherever the boundary between sound and music is for you these basic concepts can be used when creating a soundwalk. Scales are connected to the concept of pitch, which is the frequency of a sound. Scales consist of notes which are discrete musical units with a specific frequency, for example 440 Hz for an A on the Western classical scale. (And 220 Hz and 880 Hz for the same note lower or higher with an interval we call an octave.) If we perceive a sound as one of the musical units we label as a note we start judging whether it is what we call in or out of tune. We are conditioned in such a way that music being in or out of tune brings a lot of meaning with it. Also specific scales can have specific feelings connected with them. For example we associate major scales with positive feelings and minor scales with things like sadness. Changing scale a lot within a piece of music can make it draw attention or even make it a challenging thing to listen to. When you start combining musical elements from different sources the tuning and the key are important because they decide how well different sounds work together. Especially when you start using Echoes functionality which might result in several sounds playing at the same time this is important to be aware of. Also something you purely regard as a sound effect can still have a pitch, although chances are it will not be a perfectly tuned note.

Rhythm has a strong relation to the musical concept of tempo. Tempo is another parameter that can be a very useful tool when working with music for a soundwalk. If you set up your walk in such a way that people are walking while listening, a clear rhythm and tempo will almost always have an influence on the walking speed. If you have ever gone for a run with music on your headphones you will know how certain music seems more suitable than other. The right tempo can keep you going and gently nudge your pace, while something too slow is hard to ignore and might even slow you down. Something wildly unrelated in tempo but with a clear rhythm might annoy you or seem out of place while it would work fine while standing still.

Similar to scales, certain tempos and rhythms can also trigger associations and feelings. With fast and slow this is obvious, but also think about for example the feeling a waltz (a piece in ¾ time) gives as opposed to a rhythm like that of a heartbeat. Also consider how the tempo going up throughout your walk will for example create more excitement than when it would gradually get lower.

Like with pitch if your walk has moments where multiple tracks might be playing at the same time it’s important to consider their temporal relationship. A piece with a ¾ measure at a 102 BPM tempo starting on top of a piece in ⅞ at a tempo of 117 will clearly produce sonic chaos, even if they are in the same scale et cetera. And even two ‘four to the floor’ techno tracks at the same BPM might not blend well together when the start of the second one was not on a beat of the first one.

Of course not every piece of music has a clear rhythm so for example with two ambient tracks you might only be concerned about the pitch. If you are working with rhythm you might be interested to learn that Echoes has so called ‘tempo sync’ functionality to keep things in time. In the example above that could for instance make sure the two tracks at equal tempo are in sync. (It would also work for tracks with a different tempo, but it wouldn’t automatically match the tempos.)

In spite of the extreme briefness and simplification this hopefully illustrates the idea that even a basic awareness of musical parameters like pitch and tempo and what they can do can be a big help in telling a story through sound.

A practical side note on working with music is the existence of copyright. If you plan to publish your soundwalk you are obliged to make sure you have the right to use any existing music that is in your work. The details vary from country to country but in general existing, contemporary (as in: from roughly the last 75 years) music is copyrighted. Permission might be obtained through whatever institution is responsible in your area or sometimes through the artists themselves. Alternatives are obviously making your own music, or using music for which the copyright has expired (Archive.org is a good online resource) or which was copyright or royalty free to begin with.