The experimental music piece I would like to analyze as an example of “sound shaping” is one of my favorite albums by Amnesia Scanner “Another Life”. The track carries on their previous style, creating a sense of anxiety and unease.
In terms of genre, it is a classic example of deconstructed club music. Listeners experience a futuristic, but anxious and uneasy mood. It contains a dark atmosphere while maintaining fast, intense break dance beats just like a machine gun. This kind of conlict feeling perfectly reveals the modern human emotion, that we are both excited and terrified by rapid technological advancement such as the development of AI.
When it comes to sound design, the duo conducts a lot of experiment on sound design techniques. After conducting my research, I found that the core feature of this album is the heavy use of an AI-synthesized voice named “Oracle”. This cold and emotionless machine voice creates a strong, cold “post-human” feeling. Also, they feature Pan Daijing in some of the track to the sense of conflict. In the structure of the composition, they use a lot of heavy industrial noise, breaking sound samples, and break a lot vocal then adding huge distortion to create the sense of anxious.
As a conclusion, this album is not only an extreme experiment between human and AI vocals, but also use a lot of extreme sound chops and huge effects.
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