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Following on from my previous post, where I talked about building the 3D world and using a boids algorithm to give the fish their own collective behaviour, I’ve been having lots of fun with this and taken the project a step further this week into procedural sound and synthetic voices.
There are no recorded sounds in the piece. Rather than playing back a fixed soundtrack or samples, the entire soundscape is generated live and responds directly to what the fish are doing. As the shoal gathers, splits apart, changes direction or forms smaller groups, the sound changes with it.
It’s built from oscillators, filtered noise, resonant frequencies, echoes and long underwater reverbs. It can move from happy, glass-like sine and triangle tones into layers of detuned saws, sub sine and ominous drones, depending on the behaviour of the fish.
There are also bubbles, fin-like flicks, distant tonal glints and other small sounds appearing throughout, but all of them are synthesised by the system. None of it is arranged into a fixed composition. There’s no central score dictating exactly what should happen or when. The individual sounds respond to the activity around them and gradually build something larger together.
That’s what I’ve found most interesting about taking the idea into sound. There’s no conductor, but the orchestra still plays. The composition emerges from lots of small interactions rather than being imposed from above, and it remains alive because it is never completely fixed.
I’ve also been experimenting with procedural voices. Rather than using recorded speech, the system builds them from synthetic vocal cords, breath, consonant noise and shifting vowel formants.
The fish attempt to speak in their own strange language. Sometimes recognisable words and phrases surface before dissolving back into something more animal and abstract. Sometimes the voices become melodic; sometimes they fracture into echoes, whispers or unsettling doubles.
It feels as though the shoal is gradually inventing a shared language of its own, shaped collectively but never completely controlled by any one voice.
No fixed score.
No conductor.
No single voice speaking for the whole.
Just lots of individual parts listening, responding and creating something together. It’s quite beautiful.
It’s still very much a work in progress, but the whole thing is beginning to feel much more alive. I can’t wait to share the finished experience and digital installation with you folk.
Ritual Descent: Emergence continues...