The October 2008 Challenge
Create one to three minutes of spooky music. There are no requirements as to genre, vocals, instruments, or anything of its contents. Just make it spooky, and at least sixty seconds long.
The Results
Brian Raiter
A Spooky March (1:01)
Nice. I particularly like the last few seconds; that final sample (the word “something”?) has a nice spine-tingly quality.
by Sam Bleckley — 6 November 2008 @ 22:16
I was originally planning on using this rather nice melodica I own as the main musical source, but when it came time to sit down and record I couldn’t find it anywhere. So in the end all I had was a harmonica and a bunch of old sound effects on my hard drive. The sound effects were mostly relics from when I recorded a bunch of source material which I used to make sound effects for a computer game, plus some random bits that I had created years ago while playing around with various audio programs. Most of the bell sounds in my piece come from a single source (namely the bell from an oven timer) processed in various ways. A few sounds, like the drum beats, are completely synthesized, but everything else came through a microphone. The harmonica sounds were played by me and then assembled into the final piece. Every single sound was put in place manually. I learned a fair bit about using Audacity to assemble a piece of music, which was one of my main goals this month.
My idea was to evoke a dark, mysterious, swampy sort of locale, with vague figures and voices coming and going all around but never quite resolving into anything recognizable. But the overall effect has a certain goofiness which sort of prevents from really being spooky at all. In fact, its title should probably be “A Sound Effects March”.
by Brian — 7 November 2008 @ 01:00