MDes Sound for the Moving Image School of Innovation & Technology
Callum Geddes
Callum’s range of practice encapsulates live performance, audio-visual media, electroacoustic sound design and musical composition. For his Undergraduate degree, Callum specialised in piano performance, and composition, harnessing his passion for narrative expression through music. Shifting his focus towards sound design, he often recalls upon experiences within natural landscapes, due to growing up in rural Scotland. His passion for electronic music fuses the organic/technology binary, resulting in electroacoustic explorations into how he can immerse listeners into natural world’s through technological means.
The Plateau
Video Recording and Editing, Field-Recordings, Narration and Music captured and produced by Callum Geddes
The Plateau is a short film inspired by my existence and memories within The Cairngorms. The visuals are painted through a faded, nostalgic lens, whilst narration, inspired by the writings of Nan Shepherd, guide the audience on a journey into the extrusions and fissures of the mountains. Electroacoustic music, composed solely from field recordings of natural soundscapes utilising techniques such as granular synthesis, aims to document the human response to organic atmospheres, creating sonic eco-systems for the listener to immerse themselves in. The Plateau reveals hidden architectures of the landscape, whilst taking the audience on a meditative trip to a simpler reality.
Project Links
CosmoSound
Capturing my fascination of liminal spaces, outer-space and electronic music, CosmoSound is a first-person, exploration game focussed on creating a sonic experience for the player to interact within a virtual world. The game utilises music and effects to tell the story of past inhabitants on the spherical planet, alluding to life that was once there, but is now gone. Focussing on how sound can generate narrative, CosmoSound is made up of three pathways, each taking the player on a different story through contrasting sonic atmospheres.
I believe that CosmoSound has been a successful project, as I have explored how to compose ambience and music for an interactive landscape. It has unearthed a new method of working for me, which involved a lot of cut and pasting of sonic snippets I gathered and composed over the semester. Exploring how FMOD parameters can be triggered within Unity opened a plethora of opportunities for me to collage these sound snippets together, overall creating a game that encompasses numerous textures of my soundscape creations.
In completing this project, I have gained and increased numerous skills that will be useful for me in future projects. I have never coded before, and so finding my way around C# programming was a very steep learning experience. I have been able to implement simple C# script into Unity to perform actions such as pop-up menus (in the form of an options screen and the notes) and modify a first person controller to use the gravity of the spherical planet rather than Unity’s default flat gravity.
FMOD Snapshot
The Sugarboat
This was my first work completed on the course, a still-image, short-film based on the prompt ‘Clyde Built’. My take on the phrase, ‘Clyde Built’, follows the story of a Greek-registered boat, The Captayannis, which, fifty years ago, capsized due to strong winds at Greenock’s Port. I found it easiest to break this story into three loose sections, starting with setting the scene at Greenock’s port, then to the ship’s venture out at sea, finishing with the capsizing and decaying of The Captayannis as it becomes part of the Scottish landscape.
The soundscape of ‘The Sugarboat’ sources sonic snippets of bagpipes, reversed in post, violin creaks and scrapes and recordings of my own vocal improvisations. I have included this work as I feel it showcases the growth of my skills and confidence from the start of the course, to my latest project, The Plateau.
Remember Me
Remember Me is an experimental, clicker-based game that illuminates themes of nostalgia and memory loss. The audio-centric experience aims to explore the protagonist’s last living moments, uncovering their memories which appear in the form of a poem and 3-Dimensional objects that can be interacted with through a click and drag system. The objective of the game is for the player to explore the sonic relationships between each of the memories within the designated space, which we refer to as the character’s mind, uncovering pockets of sound that eventually grow to create a rich, dense atmosphere of sonic wonder. Within our group, Sesia took the role of designing the concept art, visual FX and animation, Yinjun covered programming the gameplay and audio within Unity and C#, whilst Callum lead all the audio design and programming using Ableton, Reaper and FMOD.
Persona Re-Sound Design
Contains violence, blood and nudity.
A re-invention of the sound design for Ingmar Bergman’s, Persona (1966). In order to create a cohesive soundtrack to meld together the contrasting visual material, I used the spectral oscillator plug-in, Vital, to sculpt and design my own instrument allowing me to experiment with wave warping to act on a waveform’s harmonics creating an abundance of timbres, with the added aid of other time-based effects. This instrument plays throughout the entirety of the piece.
This sound design project involved experimenting with the effectiveness of sync points. By keeping them to a minimum, I aimed to make them more effective when they were used, such as the semi-‘jumpscare’ when one of the characters in the second-half opens their eyes. This project involved attentive Foley work, especially when re-enacting the boys movements in his bed, sonically.