Sunday Fantasy Continued

Well, here I am again with another post. I know you are all surprised, saying to yourselves, 'what kind of a Sloth is this lady?' Well, let me tell you, you should be asking, 'what kind of a lady is this Sloth?' I have been exploring the new and exciting field of staring at a wall or a window for a really long and then closing my eyes tight and trying to name all the colours of the colour splotches that appear under my eyelids. This activity is best done lying down. Ooooh lavender.
There is something, however, about me that is very unsloth-like. Guilt. When I am not in a sleepy stupor, I am consumed with guilt. Guilt about all the things that I really, really should be doing. Sloths never seem like they feel guilty about anything. I mean, look at them. I love this video because of the guy just cracking up in the background. Anyway, sloths do not look guilty, probably because they have nothing they should be doing other than being a sloth. Sometimes, well most of the time, I feel as though what life requires of me is much more than what I was meant to be. Like, for instance, I feel that human beings were never supposed to be fiscally responsible, or have bank accounts. And when I feel this way I start staring at walls.
But I am like a sloth in a lot ways. Watch this video to find out why. Or I could just summarize: my muscles have been 'reduced to thin ribbons' through inactivity, I generally defecate in the same place (unfortunately David Attenborough rarely stands by and watches), and I move really slowly. I do not however choose to do less instead of eating less. I just do both. And I don't eat leaves. often. Also, why does Attenborough pronounce sloth like 'sloath.' I wonder if sometimes he pronounces things wrong, only no one tells him because even if it was wrong, after he pronounces it a certain way, it's right. And it has always been right. It's called the Attenborough effect. I also wonder how much I do in the time it takes David Attenborough to eat lunch.

Anyway..

I have been working a little more on my H.G. Wells piece(I am making a kind of musical radio play using an H.G. Well's short story) only I've been stuck for the past few days, unsure, musically, where to go next. I am sampling my own voice and adding effects and doing a little audio processing, and so far it sounds pretty cool and creepy, but I'm just stuck for ideas now. It's an interesting challenge. How can you properly underscore speech so that both stay interesting. It seems to me that one always takes away from the other. That's why in movies they always bring it down low, though I don't know why they always use strings under dialogue. It would seem to me that strings, sounding so much like the human voice, would draw attention away from the dialogue. But it seems to work. Maybe because they use a string section, or maybe because the string sound blends with the voice so that there isn't any competition. Like there might be between say a saxophone and a human voice, or an oboe. Or maybe its just a musical symbol. Woodwind instruments always felt more like voices to me, regardless of whether or not they are similar in sound to the human voice, because they are often used as individual voices, as solo voices. So maybe when you hear an oboe, you think solo voice, because that is what it usually is, irregardless of whether or not the sound itself is especially distinctive. Hmmm, I wonder what an oboe choir would sound like. Oh God NOOOO!! Wow. That there is a very good reason why there aren't a lot of oboes in an orchestra.
Oh well, so far, I'm underscoring human spoken voice with human sung voice (it's all my voice actually). I used my own voice to make the music (sat around in my room singing pitched syllables like 'na' over and over into my laptop and then put them onto a sampler). I am glad that I did that. The human voice is so variable and has so much in it to work with. Maybe I should try using just audio files instead of midi instruments. I'll think about it.
Besides, the snowpocalypse is keeping me away from the lab at school, so I can't do much now anyway.

Here is some more of that story I was working on:

The wind whistled in her ears as she ran, or rather slid, down the mountain. The enormous bird's shadow was just about to overtake her when she suddenly remembered a movie from her childhood, In Search of the Castaways, an insidious Disney adventure film starring Hailey Mills. At one point in the film Hailey little brother is captured by a giant eagle who lifts him up by his shoulders. A native shoots the bird down and it falls like a leaf, slowly spiraling to the ground. When she was a little girl she knew two things about this sequence that she still knew now:1)the bird wouldn't hold onto her shoulders with its talons, it would rip through her shoulders with its talons, and 2)if she did manage an escape from the bird in midflight, obliging native or no, she would not fall to the earth like a leaf, she would fall to the earth like a human being.
It might also, very probably, gauge my eyes out, she thought in an inexplicably calm inner voice. Her outer voice, which up until now had been waiting for her inner voice to finish, decided to start screaming.
Up ahead she saw a thick forest and she made for it like as if her feet were skis. She made it just in time. The bird flew back up into the sky and screeched dejectedly.
Immediately upon arrival into the forest, she wrapped her arms around the friendliest looking tree and threw up. Afterwards she let out a few comforting sobs.
She looked back up the mountain. She looked up and saw the bird still circling in the sky.
'Well, I can't go back that way,' she said.
She looked down the mountain and into the forest. It was dark and quiet. A piece of snow fell off a tree in a menacing kind of way. It made no noise. Snow dampened, she thought.
She sighed and started to make her way down the mountain through the forest.
As she walked the air grew warmer and she started feeling a little better about things. All I really have to do, she thought, is make my way up that other mountain. So long as I don't get mauled by some animal or something, I should be just fine. The forest started to sing with birds. Tiny birds, she thought.
Mingled with the birdsong, she started to hear a strange melody played on an instrument a little like a flute only more woody. The sound went in and out. It bounced off and trees, and she couldn't tell where it was coming from until she was standing right in front of the musician.
'Oh,' she said.
His skin was alabaster white. He looked, from behind, like a statue in a museum. She imagined she could almost hear the marble grinding as his back muscles moved. He was sitting on a rock covered in snow, and being so white himself he was well camouflaged. He was playing a pan pipe, and when he turned around she noticed that his eyes were a deep green flecked with gold. She also noticed that he had goat legs. And little horns.
'If you are a nymph, a nereid, or a dryad,' he said, 'I am feeling a little bit down right now and I am not interested in chasing you and ravishing you. So please leave me alone.'
'Uh.. goat legs,' she replied.
'What?' he said.