MDes Sound for the Moving Image School of Innovation & Technology
Peter Billingham
Pete has been in or around recording studios since 1990, when his parents gave him an Amiga home computer for Christmas. He has recorded in recording studios across the UK and has worked on tracks in Soho studios with Howard Werth (Audience, Captain Beefheart’s Magical Band, The Doors), and gigged extensively in and around London at venues such as The Astoria, The Electric Ballroom, The Aquarium, The Camden Underworld, and Slimelight.
He has played alongside bands such as Ultraviolence, VNV Nation, Haujobb and Sensorium, released several singles, and has been featured on a compilation album with Depeche Mode, Moby, Pitchshifter and Killing Joke.
In 2018, Pete collaborated with 2 other Forth Valley College students to contribute original chiptune music to the Audio Engineers’ Society’s Christmas Lecture on game music by Dr Kenny McAlpine. In late 2019 Pete worked with Velvet Wolf Films to compose the score for a BBC short film, “Haggis”, which was broadcast on Burns Night 2020.
Rain
Few phenomena can be considered more common to human experience than rain. Across the globe rain has meaning to everyone, though what that meaning is varies greatly depending on culture, opinions, and beliefs. From a life-giving necessity to the cause of devastating disasters, rain can be both a torrential force of nature, or irritation in the background.
In Glasgow, rain has become part of the fabric of the city. The third wettest city in the United Kingdom, a country with over 100 words or phrases for rain, it rains here on average every other day.
As a common, shared experience rain, and our perception of it, is an ideal topic for opening interesting and engaging topics of conversation with interviewees, giving insight into how they feel about wider topics, and how they engage with the world in a wider sense.
This work is a collaboration with Ellie Ford, James Fairlie, and Jamie Graham.
The Flow of Dread
This is a horror game. Although there is no gore there is tension, a sense of dread throughout, and jump scares.
This project is a video game that serves as a homage to 4 very different composers – John Carpenter, Jerry Goldsmith, Brian Reitzell, and Christopher Young – whose work in the genre of horror films has been instrumental in shaping the way I perceive music in film from an early age, and in making me want to make music myself.
Through composing pieces in their styles and setting those pieces as adaptive musical scores for a series of atmospheric corridors themed around the films they scored, I take the player on a short, dread-filled audiovisual journey that is my love letter to some of the composers who have influenced my creative practice the most.