About The Days:
Project Title: “The days”
Adviser: Chan Cheuk Wah Charles
As the Graduation Thesis is the final work from me before graduate and maybe my only chance to step into the sound art field, I created a music album, which totally represent and created by me. This music album states 4 truly feelings of me in my 4-year university life. They are named “Daily”, ”Midnight”, “Confused” and “Final”.
The songs recorded my days from being a freshman to now a graduating student. The name of the album “The Days” represent my days as a university students, my days be living in Hall and my days studying school of Creative media. There are happy and moody memories in these 4 years here. All these precious memories created this album and me.
Track 01 “ 日常Daily“
The inspiration of this song is from the memories of my first two year's university life. The first two years of my university life is very relaxing that we do not have to worry about anything. It is so different from now as we need to worry about graduation and have to think about our future plan. Pressures and stress are always the first two things coming into my mind when I wake up everyday. I miss the leisurely days that I could wake up in the afternoon and enjoy the faint sunshine that shines into my room. I think maybe I could never taste that leisure and relax moment again in my life, so I decided to record the moment down by writing a song about it.
This song is written in Cantonese. The lyrics are very simple. It mainly talks about the moody and lazy situation of waking up in an ordinary afternoon. Lying on the bed, watching the sunshine shines from the window and breathing the moist and the laziness in the air. Finally, get back to sleep.
The slow pace of the song helps create the lazy mood. In addition, the huge reverb of the main vocal represent the scenario of just woke up.
In the choice of instrument, I simply chose guitar and bass. To keep it simple, the arrangement and instruments are very basic. And I added the sound of high pitch percussion to introduce the main rhythm.
Track02 “ 午夜Midnight“
When I am alone, I am emotional and depress. But that makes me to concentrate on art and create good work. So I always put myself into a lonely situation. Although the lonely feeling push me to create and work, it sometimes hurts. I think this conflictive feeling is very interesting so I wrote this song to record my conflictive feeling down.
The lyrics are written in Mandarin. The main concept "it is what loneliness like " keeps repeating in the chorus part of the song. Sometimes you want to be the spotlight in front of the people, but sometimes you just want to stay back and enjoy the loneliness that created or build by yourself. When singing or listening to this song you could feel the loneliness inside the rhythm and lyrics.
I use the Harp to do the bass part of the song. Instead of the ordinary warm tone Harp sound, I tuned it to make it more "cold". Also, I added a lot of back up voice and added a big reverb to them to create the emptiness atmosphere. There are drumbeats in the latter part of the song cause I try to build up the mood but it is a bit wired because the choice of the drumbeat does not match with the song.
Track 03 “ 迷霧Confused “
In our generation, we are pre-registered to many things. Everyone tells us what to do and what not to do. As I live in Cityu hall, I meet many students from other college. Some of them actually have no interests in their major, they're just eventually got into this major or being told by someone that this is good for them. I am a very lucky one that could choose what I want to study and enjoy in it. I treasure this very much. I can't imagine how the people can keep doing things they don't like for 4 years.
Everyone has the right to speak out what they truly believe, but no one can make the decision for you. In the world that full of judgment and opinions, we still need to listen to our true self.
Apart from right and wrong (which I think actually it doesn't matter), we should believe ourselves and we have the rights to do anything to ourselves.
This song is written in English. At the beginning, there are someone whispering about “ Everyone talks about…” to represent the world also ask us to do what they want or follow their steps. In the chorus, it represent that we want to escape from this and rather to die and sink to the bottom of the world.
I added many sound elements in the background. For example, the ambience recorded in AC1 canteen and dialogues of others. I boost the bass of these sound elements to create an oppressive atmosphere. Also, I boosted the high frequency of the dialogue and use the pitch transform plug in to make them sounds like robot. All these tuning and mixing is use to create an uncomfortable and oppressive feeling to the audience.
Track 04 “ 最後Final “
As the final track of my album, I simply name it “Final”. It is always difficult to make an end for everything. Throughout my 4-year university life, the most precious experience must be my hall life. I live in hall 1 for 4 years. From freshmen, to now I am the hall tutor. I learnt a lot in hall and also met many people at hall. They are from different department, with different background. In the semester end, I used to say goodbye to those who graduate or leave hall. Unfortunately, in this year is my turn.
Actually, I am not ready to leave this place as I contribute a lot in here and I gain a lot too. This gain and pay creates the relationship between the hall and me and of cause the people who are living in here. It is very weird that how I want to stay with hallmates but I have to spend my time to work very hard to finish my FYP and then graduate from here. Especially, I need to be alone when I create. So I decided to write a song about this although I am not familiar with this kind of genre.
The lyrics are written in Mandarin. It is talking about the meet and part of people. We don't even have enough time to grasp everything we treasure but time keeps running away. I want to stay but my foot just keeps walking away from here because this is life. The youngers should treasure the most beautiful and energetic moment in their life as the passion and excitement would disappear when we grown up. I am unwilling to leave and grow up but I never regret for anything that we’ve been through in here.
The musical arrangement in this song is the most difficult one among my album. I added many instrument to make it rich. I tuned all the software instruments to make them sounds more interesting and saturated.