The roaring of Norse gods (Oslo)

Part of the Sacred Spaces project - find out more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/sacredspaces

Reimagined by Hazal Elif Yalvac.

" I selected this Vigeland Mauseoleum. I have always wanted to visit it to hear it in real time. I was in Norway in 2014 September, visiting Oslo as well, seeing the legendary Vigeland Park. And I also had the chance to visit Bergen back in 2015, August. I didn't have the chance for Vigeland Mauseoleum during any of my visits. But I wanted to take this opportunity to reimagine the sound of a space that I've never seen before. Norway is home to some of Planet Earth's most attractive natural beauties as well as a unique deep history of Vikings. As one of the most peaceful countries of our planet, it inspires me a lot. I wanted to imagine a conflict of a legend that, in my story, used to take place in this Mauseoleum. Here, Norse Gods and evil forces are depicted in this piece. First of all, the resonance effects I designed through use of both granular and long textural delays represent the roaring of Gods. Apart from designing such sounds, I also tapped into a simplistic technique of additive synthesis on the human-like choir sound at the end of the original recording by simply adding frequency-shifted sounds also through ring modulation, which I wanted to turn into an absorptive acoustic space, getting bigger with decays and diffusion as well as through the freeze effect. I attempted to tap into a wide range of frequency spectrum. I therefore included noisy and glitchy textures as well. However, I thought that such sounds I designed through pulsar synthesis, as coined by Mr. Curtis Roads, should fit into this atmosphere of such venue as Vigeland Mauseoleum that can offer a great acoustic space. To this end, I tried to avoid an artificial sound design for such milisecond sounds, which could also create great spaces, but in this case, I wanted to achieve a consistency and coherence of sounds. So, I designed this as a response to lengthy textural drones. I also tapped into subtractive synthesis by using filtering techniques mostly including low-pass filtering.

While the delay resonances represent roaring of Norse Gods, they resolve into a voice-like drone which represents death as an indication of respect for those beloved ones we lose/lost. In this case, Gods might have been fighting against dark forces. Those dying are commemorated but dark forces do not leave, which are represented through noisy textures after the resolution of drones. Still, a peaceful darkness is there because no matter what, the evil ones will be fought against, as represented with the low-pass filter drone resolution at the end."