Today I made the piece for the submission: a harsh noise composition built entirely from sampled audio of Instagram Reels. I aimed to convey the overwhelming and draining experience of doomscrolling to make the listener feel something of what it actually does to you.
I started by using a chrome extension to sample audio directly from myself scrolling reels on Instagram, then bouncing them into Ableton. Some of the samples were chosen for personal reasons. I included a Vyvanse advert, looping the section “call your doctor right away” I haven’t been able to access ADHD medication for almost a year, and the process of organising that, getting in touch with my GP, my previous medication provider, contacting the pharmacy, and jumping through all of these convoluted hoops has been a genuine struggle. I think a large part of that, and my executive dysfunction more generally, is connected to short-form content consumption. Sometimes I just get stuck to my phone and it can be really hard to snap out of it. Afterwards I’m often left with a sense of anxiety and very low motivation and energy to do anything useful. Making the piece felt like a way of being honest about that rather than just theorising around it.
Part of the process that is most audible involved heavily processing everything. The main techniques were sidechain compression between different samples, LFOs randomly modulating each other to modulate various parameters across devices, slowing and speeding up audio from specific videos, and running the master through a Bin Scrambler, 30 instances of OTT, a Faturator, a glue compressor for distortion, and reverb (all modulated by previously mentioned LFOs). The piece is intentionally unbroken until the end. I closed it with an unprocessed iPhone turning-off sound effect, which felt fitting and appropriate.
Throughout the composition I also used samples from the original recording resampled and overprocessed to the point of unrecognisability. This was to represent how inhabiting this digital space feels, and how little of it you actually retain. The disintegration of the audio is meant to mirror the disintegration of the information itself.
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