EmuMan
Songtober is a sort of challenge based off of the popular informal drawing event, Inktober. In the case of Inktober, for every day of October, there is a new prompt that should be drawn by whoever is participating. You can read more about it here. When one of my friends shared the 2020 prompt list, since I can't draw, I had the idea to do the challenge but with music instead of drawing. And thus Songtober was born.
Just as a side note, I am sure I am not the first to come up with this idea, but I have also never really seen anyone else do it, so for me it's a new concept. Enjoy my musical interpretations of these prompts.
NOTE: Wearing headphones or using external speakers (not your phone or laptop's built-in speakers) will make your listening experience much better. I promise.
| Day | Title | Duration |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Fish | --:-- |
| 2 | Wisp | --:-- |
| 3 | Bulky | --:-- |
| 4 | Radio | --:-- |
| 5 | Blade | --:-- |
| 6 | Rodent | --:-- |
| 7 | Fancy | --:-- |
| 8 | Teeth | --:-- |
| 9 | Throw | --:-- |
| 10 | Hope | --:-- |
| 11 | Disgusting | --:-- |
- Now playing -
--:-- / --:--
The main feature of this is the kind of arpeggiated chords in the background through the whole thing. I was kind of going for a "bloop" sound, and it sorta worked I guess? The wah-sounding thing at the beginning was supposed to be a little fishy as well, I don’t know why I made that correlation but hey I tried. The bells at the end were supposed to be underwater-y and smooth and stuff. I also drowned the whole thing in reverb (maybe a bit too much) and cut a lot of the high frequencies to add a little bit to the underwater feel.
This one is more of a soundscape than anything, which is kinda cool I guess. It's like the song you'd expect to hear when you encounter a mysterious floating glow-y smoke-y thing in the woods at night or something. I used a whole tone scale to try to convey a sort of fantasy vibe for the whole thing. I actually based this off of an old sample I found of a vocal thing that I re-tuned to a single note and then put a crap ton of reverb on. I ran it through some granular synthesis, which is basically playing the sample from different points randomly to create like a whole bunch of the sound but all at different points in time, and then I played it really low and yeah. I hadn't really touched granular synthesis so it was pretty fun. The rest is mostly just ambient wind and chime noise I got off of a website and some extra noise to make the lead sound more breath-y.
My first thought was basically that this bass would sound pretty bulky (in my eyes), so I kinda formed everything else around it. It turned out more sneaky than I would have liked, although it still has some of that chunky quality I think. Maybe something bulky sneaking around? I don't know. Other than that I'm actually okay with how it turned out. Also sorry if the bass is too loud or quiet, it's pretty headphone-dependent unfortunately and I went on the louder side.
So the first thing I thought of when I heard "radio" was a sort of sampled lo-fi, retro aesthetic, but like, crunchier. So I kinda went with that here, and it worked out I think. The voice is from this video that I happened to remember.
For this one I basically downloaded a few different sword sounds and used some percussion loops both from libraries and mine to create the kind of tribal groove going on behind. I also thought it got a little boring near the middle so I decided to add some dramatic orchestra parts to increase the energy. Not terribly well mixed, but oh well.
I had been thinking about it for a while. I mean how in the world am I supposed to make a song about rodents??? So I basically just took a kinda squeak-sounding lead and a fast-paced tempo to indicate something scurrying around, maybe running away from something, and went from there. And now I regret everything. I'm also fairly certain that I just completely copied the melody of some other random song out there. Either that or this is the most generic cartoon-y chase music ever written.
The first thing that came to mind when I heard "Fancy" was a bunch of old fashioned people sitting around in some ballroom sipping wine and listening to some guy in a wig play an old harpsichord. So that's what I tried to emulate here. I am fairly certain the beginning is extremely similar to an already existing song, but I tried to make it as unique as I could. It also might be relatively imperfect to the trained ear, but I don't think I'm going to worry about small inconsistencies like that. Oh well.
The long anticipated "Teeth" song. All of the percussion is made using my teeth in a questionable ASMR-like attempt at a groovy beat. The specific technique I used for the more tonal sounds (including the electric tooth near the middle) was to identify and boost the most prominent frequency in a teeth clack. This was also the first song I livestreamed, and it was pretty fun. The sort of "stone-agey" vibe was actually Khanjan's idea, so that's cool. It ventured off into a more atmospheric direction than I had anticipated, but hey, I'm not complaining.
I bought a slide whistle for this song. A good one too. Was it worth it? Absolutely, the slide whistle is great and I would never change my decision. I tried something a bit new with this one, playing on the idea of an object rising up and falling back down to the ground and anchored to the motion of the slide whistle. It turned out okay? I think? Definitely more electronic-y than my other stuff, which was kinda fun to experiment with.
This one was honestly harder than I would have imagined. I had something else written at the end, but I felt it was a bit lacking both thematically and compositionally, so I changed it to what is now displayed here. The idea was to start off with a rather dismal tone and bring an element of, well, hope, into it, so I hope I at least got somewhat close to that goal.
I started off with a bunch of bubbly ambience, and then I decided to try some sound design and everything went downhill from there. It ended up sounding like a sort of swampy boss theme to me? Or something like that. Maybe. E says that the bass sounds like a fart sound but I guess that fits the prompt too so I can't complain much.