The Hunt

Описание: This piece was created as part of The Sound of Modern Sci-Fi, a course offered by @ThinkSpaceEducation and taught by composer @MichaelBaugh. The focus of the course is developing a personal sonic language—signature sounds—by recording real-world sources and transforming them through filtering, processing, and sampling.

For our first assignment, we were asked to integrate our signature sounds into a short soundtrack for “The Hunt,” a scene loosely inspired by the film Prey. I came to the project with a blank slate: I have never seen Prey and am unfamiliar with its music, which allowed me to approach the assignment without stylistic preconceptions and respond purely to the dramatic arc of the scene.

I created seven original signature sounds for this piece. Each was recorded using the Voice Memos app on my iPhone, then imported into Logic, where I shaped and transformed the material using a range of audio effects. Each processed sound was subsequently converted into a sampler instrument, allowing it to be played chromatically across the keyboard as a fully playable sampled sound.

The original sound sources were intentionally simple and tactile:

An organ tone.
A stone falling into water.
Breath through a low whistle.
A single note on an alto recorder.
A fragile, almost apologetic tone from a homemade PVC-pipe didgeridoo.
The restless murmur of roosting myna birds recorded in Hawai‘i.
And the metallic resonance of an old brass school bell.

Through processing and transformation, these modest sources became the core sonic vocabulary of the piece—organic, imperfect, and personal—serving as the foundation for a soundtrack that is less about imitation and more about discovery. It was a fun assignment.

Let me know what you think!

Artwork created using Adobe Firefly.