Want to Hear Halfland?

Morning in 1/2L Spring: My mock-up of a sample opening sequence frame
from the film with new (faux in this case) fresnel lens distortion and blur effects.

(flowers made of pale hand-dyed paper, sky made of 3 transparent layers.)

It's all happening very quickly now. Realizations that were hazy fragments are stunningly clear as pieces of sharp glass lens.

The Notes from Halfland coming to my unconscious mind with sudden clarity:

There would be no man-made musical instruments used in the soundtrack. (unlike what I had thought all these years) I had been envisioning a storybook, perhaps medieval, kind of folk soundtrack for this film, and had even gathered a few samples. I was about to approach a composer friend to license the use of something of his I'd heard that fit the bill, etc. But there was an awareness gathering in the knowing depths of not knowing that Halfland takes place before any instruments have been made or used. Or in a parallel place where instruments weren't made, more likely. 

I was slowly catching on, hearing, or noticing, sounds in videos that piqued my interest for use in Halfland without understanding what I was responding to. I wrote on the chalkboard to use human voice, metallic glimmers and shimmers, strums and stings, and ambient sound effects like rubs on balloons, crunches, claps, or scrapes.

I knew for years the soundtrack would be more of a "soundscape" with multiple stacks or layers of specific symbolic sounds that emphasized the storytelling, especially since there would be no dialog in it. I wrote here that there would be the sound of breaking glass and a baby crying when the dark Tarn entered the story.

I watch a lot of YouTube. I mean a lot. Gardening videos to educate me for food growing, stand up comedy to laugh, Tiny House tours, Black and white movies from the '30s and '40s for film education, etc. Inexplicably, I also kept watching horrible true crime murder videos, telling myself it was head-tweaking and that I should stop. But I kept pressing play on them because their soundtrack was acting on me like catnip. True Crime genre video documentary shows usually have these "tonal drones" running as they are laying out the truly horrific details of the cases. And even though the subject of the videos was making me afraid to ever leave the house again, the droning "tension" sounds were calming me and really interesting.

So now I know why. Just an hour or two ago, Paul showed me a cool new website for generating sound. I knew this was what I had been waiting for within 5 seconds. I have been sitting here reading how to use the amazing site and experimenting to see if it would work for Halfland and it was like the movie's hand fitting inside this sound track's glove. Perfect. Perfect. Perfect. Yes.

From the "Brainwaves" section there I learned about the origins of *Solfeggio Tones and their healing effects. I added one to my experimental opening sequence stack. And it did everything I had hoped.

I signed up as a patron of the genius creator of this site, Dr. Ir. Stéphane Pigeon, (research engineer & sound designer) which provides access to expanded features and sounds to utilize for a modest monthly $5 donation.  He offers this extensive therapeutic sound site for free on a donation basis and records much of the sounds himself in remote locations. It's incredible. Best thing ever.

I just made my first SuperGenerator with four separate soundscapes; Chapel Voices, Solfeggio Tones, Distant Thunder, and Meadow Land, all gorgeous and profound.  I'll be able to take these generators as MP3 files into my video editing software as layers, modulate, embellish them with other sound files that flow with the action. I'm extremely excited at the potential of this new sound approach will have on the film.

Want to hear the first background soundscape for Halfland's Opening sequence? <<<<Click the link to the Super Generator and let it load! (Picture the visuals of the scenes rendered in the style of the top image.)

Here's a still shot of the 31 elements composed and controlled as I wanted them. (If you hover your cursor over each slider in the actual SuperGen linked above, you will be able to see the names of each specific sound that was used to make the scape.) Enjoy!

*...Solfeggio tones were introduced by Dr. Joseph Puleo and Dr. Leonard Horowitz in the seventies and were inspired by real facts. The name of these tones - for example - finds their roots in the eleventh century, when music theorist Guido of Arezzo developed a six-note ascending scale: ut, re, mi, fa, sol, and la. The seventh note, si, came a little later. These names were taken from the first verse of a Latin hymn to St. John the Baptist, Ut Queant Laxis.

Ut queant laxis, resonare fibris
Mira gestorum, famuli tuorum
Solve polluti, labii reatum
Sancte Iohannes

These names are still in use today in musical notation. They have precise frequency associations, octave by octave, which are derived from a particular musical temperament. The frequencies that were associated by Puleo and Horowitz are different: they were generated from the Bible's Book of Numbers, using a Pythagorean reduction algorithm based on our decimal number representation, applied to verse numbers of Chapter 7...