I’m making these available for grins. I put together a music bed for a video project I created, just to see what I could do. I pulled in hundreds of sounds from the Internet, everything from a thunderclap to a propane fueled, flame- shooting pipe organ, me breathing, beat tracks, even a short, haunting sounding bit that sounds like it came from a recording of singing in a church, so it’s everything but the kitchen sink. I originally started with a THX sound clip full of lightning, ripped apart and remixed thunder into left and right channels, ran effects galore, bounced tracks back and forth, and I suspect with a good set of headphones on, you’ll get a better feel for the overall mood I was shooting for as I created this work.
I shifted tracks, added and deleted, stretched out their timing, changed the pitch, even reversed some sounds and remixed it back on top of the same sound going forward. It got pretty intricate as I went along, at one point I realized I had over a hundred individual tracks going at once, so I had to mix it down into combined “building blocks” of different mixes, otherwise the load on my computer got insane.
I created numerous mixes of the music bed as I worked, saving each version, just for the sake of documenting the creative process, which is one of the main reasons I do anything artistic. It’s not so much the finished product that I enjoy when it’s done, as much it’s about how much of myself was invested, the hours and hours of my life I’ve invested into creating something. I start out with a general feel for an idea, you tinker and toy with ideas, things start to gel, then you do it all over again the next day, realizing what was brilliant last night really sucks today. So I’m putting these online as a way of sharing my time spent, with something tangible. I can’t put it all online, since there’s a few gigs worth of mp3 files that were created doing this, but there’s enough here to let you see the various stages I went through to reach the final product.
Oh- the final project can be seen here. Or look for the link in the sidebar for the higher quality version.
The differences in some of these are minor, others were pretty dramatic, where I’d chucked days worth of work and started from scratch. I don’t know if anyone’s interested in this sort of thing or not, but here it is.
Credits: The audio you’re listening to was created entirely with Audacity, a free, open source music editing program. This was mostly notes mixed and melded and manipulated greatly to create the sound bed for the video project. If you take anything away from this, I’d love to hear about it. For the geeky people reading this, here’s a screenshot of one of the mixdowns. There were a lot of tracks in this thing.
A word of warning: On some of these, I was messing around a great deal with filters and stuff, and there’s some with heavy EQ going on. So until you’ve heard these through beginning to end, keep your speakers down a bit. Some of these caused my monitors to move some serious air in the room due to the subsonic mixing I had going on. Just be careful, I’d hate to hear your woofers went splat against the speaker grills. Truth be told, that would make my day. 
Enjoy.
If you’d care for a really hard to put into words description of what I was trying to get across as far as the moods, you can read about it at the bottom of the page.
Here’s the soundscape files in mp3 format. Try not to read too much into my archaic file naming conventions, I’m just goofy that way.
Enjoy.
It might be best to right click on the links, SAVE FILE AS, and save it to your hard drive and run it from there, as my server occasionally gets lumpy when it streams audio.
steven_lareau-opening_credits_1-short-loud_bass.mp3
(This one is VERY loud at the beginning) 1,954kb
steven_lareau-opening_credits_3-short-church.mp3
2,395 kb
steven_lareau-dronelong_mix_whoosh_thump.mp3
2,197 kb
steven_lareau-dronelong1.mp3
2,199 kb
steven_lareau-dronelong2.mp3
2,926 kb
steven_lareau-dronelong3.mp3
2,926 kb
steven_lareau-official_extended_mix.mp3 (Yes, this really is the finished audio used in the clip) 12,369 kb
steven_lareau-demo_reel_soundscape-short.mp3
3,678 kb
steven_lareau-opening_credits_2_a-short.mp3
2,352 kb
steven_lareau-newest2.mp3
3,535 kb
steven_lareau-newest3.mp3
3,535 kb
steven_lareau-newest_with_intro-1.mp3
3,533 kb
steven_lareau-done_final_final_intro.mp3
3,495 kb
steven_lareau-finished_opening_credit_roll.mp3
3,495 kb
steven_lareau-perfection.mp3
3,495 kb
steven_lareau-newest-with_intro_low_high.mp3 (This one starts out VERY LOUD)
3,592 kb
The Moods
About the mood: I was trying to convey a sense of a dream state, almost a nightmare at times, confusing, yet somehow calming at the same time. Now that I think about it, I think I was, without really thinking about it, creating what a Bipolar Mind sound track might be like, if there was such a thing.
There’s elements of slipping deep into a quiet, mellow space, with echoes of random madness intermixed with the main theme, taking you from one stage of relaxation to the next.
At one point, which changed from version to version as I mixed the visuals to match the music mood better, you’ll hear breathing in the back ground. Hard and labored at one point, eventually getting slower and gentler, a heartbeat becomes audible, it suddenly stops as breathing stops, this is one of those moments when you’re nodding off and do that bizarre “jump” thing just before you slip into deep sleep, where a sound in the real world jumps into your dream state and jolts you, makes you jump in response, only to slip deeper and deeper into the deep sleep state. Things get dreamy, fuzzy, colors shift as you descend deeper and deeper into the dream state. What was once chaotic becomes ordered, clanking sounds and concussive thuds merge and become music, thoughts melt from one to the next, sometimes leaving shreds of the previous thought behind, which blends into another, until moods are woven together with each other.
I played a lot with things that sounded “dark” to me at the time, so there’s a lot of unnerving sounds in the mix. Faint things, so faint you’re not sure if you’re actually hearing something, that sort of thing. I played with the space between your ears, spending an insane amount of time mixing things for channel shifts, copying a crack of thunder in the left channel, pasting the copy into the right channel, and shifted it forward in time to change the delay, adding something akin to an echo effect, which is just how it sounds around here in East Tennessee when there’s a good storm going on. So if you have headphones, slip em on and give em a listen to immerse your ears into the moods I’ve created.
If you watch the video that this music was created for, it’ll give you a better idea of the overall feeling. There’s a link to it over on the sidebar, under My Stuff/ Fractal Flame Demo Reel.
I hope that when others view this, that they’ll find some sort of link between the visuals and the audio and how each was composed to fit the other. If not, I’m not surprised, as most of my ideas are sort of off the beaten path.
[...] I created a video project a few months ago, and created and mixed a music bed for the video, which is here. As I worked on the music, I created quite a few mixdown versions, which are located here. I always enjoy glimpses of the creative process as people go about creating something, so if anyone has interest in listening to the various incarnations as I worked toward the finished project, feel free to take a listen and read the notes on what went on. [...]
[...] I did the editing on this, and also created the music. It was created by assembling dozens of sound clips, which is detailed here, along with mp3 downloads of the various incarnations of the music bed, which I saved in incremental steps as I worked. You can read the details of the music part of it here. [...]