Product

Imagine in G Major. Mixed in Audacity. 

Intention

My intention was to twist Imagine, which is a pretty hopeful song, into something creepy and offputting. 

Context

Imagine in G Major was done in the vein of other G Major songs, where the audio was distorted to make the song sound creepy and disturbing. Since this week's assignment was to reinterpret a story through audio or video, I thought this might be a good way to do so. 

Process

I originally wanted to do something with The Reaper's Game, an RPG I spent all last week with, but I wasn't able to since it's primarily text based. So I went trawling through several different songs that I really liked, trying to figure a way to change them into a reversed narrative. But I discovered quite quickly that there's very little plotwise that these songs could manage. Most of them were just three verses and the chorus, and usually just had one main overarching theme. The lack of story arc made it difficult to move lines around in a single song to change meaning, so after an hour of fruitless lyric trawling, I went looking elsewhere for ideas. 

I decided that I would change the mood by changing the key, perhaps. There are some songs with lyrics that could be creepy if the song was presented in such a manner. Thus, Imagine in G Major was born. I duplicated the track in Audacity several times and played around with the pitches until it sounded similar to other G Major songs.

Reflection

The manipulation feels pretty generic, and not as creepy as it could be. It's very hard to make out the lyrics. If the lyrics were clearer, I think it would add to the creepy effect, since they can actually be a little unsettling when heard in this context  (e.g. "I hope someday you'll join us / And the world will live as one"). I think if I fiddled around some more with the layered pitches, it could have turned out a little better, maybe added some echo to make it even more surreal sounding. 

Attribution

Imagine by John Lennon