Sound Characters

"At the heart of [Disney’s] appeal was yet another development, one that was not widely recognized in the 1930s and is still little understood today: personality animation. Almost from the beginning of his career, Walt had urged his artists to go beyond the simple mechanics of animation and create characters who moved, gestured and walked in ways that expressed their personalities." J.B. Kaufman

"The lead characters are five or more major sound shapes, staged architecturally, and interacting dramatically with each other—the stars of the Mini Sound Series. Their interactions, and those of the supporting characters, other sound shapes appearing in different Episodes are developed in the storyline. (What happens to Wave #4 when it’s set up to meet The Fright? Deep and Deepest Tone disappears. Was it really shot down by The Hardbeat Force? Will it reappear? When it does, two weeks later, it’s supporting The Coast, who we know has fallen in love with God’s Big Noise.)" Maryanne Amacher

The building block of audio animation is the sound character. A character being a continuity of material and motion from which a spirit distinct within the musical whole arises. Sound characters can be predator or prey, recurrent or rare, animal or elemental. They can range from static—existing in a state of immaculate flatness, like a cartoon or a religious icon—to dynamic—exhibiting subtlety and mercuriality, like sonic ships of Theseus. They can act as foils to one another, or work together to create larger structures. They can move in murmurations which become characters in their own right. In traditional terms, sound characters are closest to motifs, or more specifically, leitmotivs. But rather than being mere notes, these motifs are fleshed out into worldly and otherworldly forms.

 

In the first phase, methodological differences between the Paris and Cologne schools produced two different styles of sound character. In musique concrète, character was conveyed through direct resemblance to existing sounds. "Monstres" might be implied by altering human or animal voices—keeping an audible connection to real world events yet rendering them fantastical. In early elektronische musik, character is conveyed less through source recognition than synaesthetic association. The purity and smooth continuousness of a consonant sine wave drone might evoke the glow of light. Of course, such characters will always be far more nebulous, more open to interpretation than those established the first way. But their presence can greatly enhance the aural storytelling. This approach makes it possible to musically represent forces that are physically present in a diegesis but not, on an unelevated level of perception, audible. But this effect works best when sound characters of the former sort are present as well, since they are, I find, what prompt you to listen in this way in the first place. 

The audio storyworld of Bayle’s “Jeîta” (1 2) makes full use of this sound character spectrum. The surge of high frequencies in the opening half minute is less sonic than psionic, a blast of psychic energy conveyed through sound. As this piercing force attenuates, leaving only its highest frequencies, physical surroundings come into focus: the “water murmurs” alluded to in the title are not lapping waves, but the “vertical water” of stalactites, falling in multilayered cascades that form an incidental dance. Other characters intermittently appear, especially a faint watery rustling, accented by ritualistic percussion hits. A semi-physical character appears, similar to the opening force in texture—but with a different motion-personality, darting and surging in lively bursts. After a pause for a “fossil bell” incantation, exploration continues. Passage through an area guarded by“stone bees”, whose undulating buzz reverberates eerily through the caverns, gets interrupted by another, longer psionic rush: this time, the surging currents carry faint shouting voices. This shining later becomes more intense, enveloping you in dense interweaving waves for minutes at a time. Sometimes, this develops into a sense of vertigo: your sense of place falters, with past rooms becoming briefly audible again, and psionic synths dive downward, creating a sense that you’re falling without actually moving. As you journey deeper into the caves, the sound character encounters become increasingly unsettling. In places, you hear the voices of “oracles”—but a million miles from the elegant, fabric-draped maidens of Victorian paintings, these presences are feral, possibly cannibalistic. When the sounds of vertical water reappear, their initially enigmatic character feels comforting. A return to the safer regions of the cave system. After several more trials, the work ends with a final magic bell incantation, the most beautiful yet; it's as though the bells have sunk beneath dark underground waters. Collectively, all these characters generate a musical experience that's meditative yet harrowing, like surviving some kind of ancient rite of passage, a journey down into the spirit realm.

In the second phase, the salient distinction was between the electric body and the forces outside it—forces floating independently or orbiting the avatar as it hurdles forward. The first category is larger than it might initially seem. Beyond the obvious central frame of the rhythm section, you can sometimes catch other sounds that suggest a complex mechanism at work. For example, the Isao Tomita sample that opens and blares agressively throughout Joey Beltram's remix of “Dominator” sounds like some kind of 3000 AD train horn. Even the memetic hoover sound of Beltram's track “Mentasm” contains the teenage excitement of a futuristic engine revving. Or take the cold, eerie oscillating drone that underlies anthems like “Warp Drive” and “Here Come the Drumz”—the latter of which Ed Rush was particularly struck by, likening to the hum of a spaceship. Similar characters would soon appear in his own productions, first in “Bludclot Artattack” (around 3:07). Yet sometimes the most striking characters are the ones at the ship's peripheries. Luke Slater’s “The Opening” includes a particularly mysterious and evocative voice fragment: thin and grainy in texture, and stuck in an erratic loop, like the sputtering of a broken transmission. The words are difficult to make out, but to me it sounds a bit like “Should I try to—” as though you’re hearing the recorded remains of an ill-fated distress call. 

Characters beyond the cockpit are often more conventional, but at times they can be brilliant in terms of audio animation. In particular, how they’re set in motion can make them more physical. Take the pads in Infiniti’s “Game One”: when they first appear at 2:06, nuanced panning (with the sound seeming to come from multiple areas of the stereo field at once) and subtle fluctuations of volume heighten the euphoric feeling that you’re not just hearing but actually moving through them, like an airplane caressed by clouds. At times these outer characters can feel closer up: the morphing acid patterns of 808 State’s “Flow Coma” might not quite be part of the electric body, but they float around it, each in its own orbit pattern, acting as a composite outer forcefield.  

This brings us back to the matter of sound characters that change over time. In acid house, the 303 baseline can glow in lava-lamp stasis: constantly shifting in exact characteristics, yet retaining its underlying form and feeling. But sometimes the transformation process becomes a character arc. One of the best extrapolations of acid aesthetics, LFO’s “Loop (Journey Mix)” is such a case. The central sound character cycles through all sorts of tactility transformations, melting, smoldering, and brightening at various stages of the journey. By the final minute, it’s charged to a triumphant energy apex. Reverb and delay aren't establishing space so much as radiating off it, trailing it like the luminous aura of a comet.