Uncanny Sounds is a project which looks at the tropes in music and sound we find scary, and seeks to situate these traits within specific themes relating to horror/Gothic genres.

The sounds of death, the horror in a voice and the eeriness of space/echoes are all deeply explored across the horror genre, and these three sound pieces investigate these themes using a combination of digital and analogue synthesis, sound recording and audio processing.

‘Death’ combines a variety of atonal, drone-like ambient noises created from analogue synthesis, with a lot of these ambiences having ghost-like frequencies incur the uncanny tone.

‘Voice’ uses atonal synthesised ambiences as a blanket for the base of the track, and incorporates various disturbing vocal samples that have been composed to unsettle the listener and instil a fearful psychoacoustic experience.

‘Spatiality’ focuses on the eeriness of echo and reverb which establishes a confused, uncanny sense of space. I used various industrial sounds and samples over a bed of almost still ambient drone noise to explore such ideas.

The term Uncanny Sounds was adopted for this project to instil the feeling of uncertainty and eeriness for the listener, hoping to achieve true evoked feelings of fear purely from sound alone.