FLOATING SOUND GALLERY

Vienna

Watanabe Rui

^{photoby ITOH}

Education 2022-current Showa Music University

Compose and Music Design Course

1-11-1, Kami asao Asao Ward, Kawasaki City Kanagawa, Japan 215-8558

MIGRAINE
02:56 (2023)
Prix du public ex aequo Catégorie B (less than 3’) petites formes 2024

I have had migraine since childhood. It comes when I don't get enough sleep, or on a rainy day. But it can also come on a healthy sunny day. When it comes, it is always without warning. It’s like the sudden passing of a neighbor over the phone. In this piece, I used sound to express the migraine I experience all the time.
In my case, there is an aura before the headache starts. I used music to express that appearance of the aura that I feel. I created the sound by layering several layers of delays, phasers, and other processing on the sound of recorded keys to express the appearance of small jittery pains.
The small distortion was then followed by a severe headache as if dropped from somewhere. The headache was expressed as both a heavy pain and a throbbing pain with bass and various other sounds, mainly cluttered electronic instruments. During the headache, a mixture of different pains would strike in my head. The pain comes on and off again and again, sometimes strong and sometimes weak, like waves. Not only smooth pain like waves, but also throbbing pain and pain that goes on and on and on. I expressed such pain mainly with synthesizer sounds in the middle part. The tremolo shook the sound from side to side, and automation of the volume made the song more intense.
The second half of the piece expressed how the pain had subsided but was incomplete again. The conga sound and the rhythm were shaken from side to side to express that the pain was still sizzling.
Overall, the piece was created by consciously layering many layers of sound to create a deep sound even within a single note or rhythm.