The Hidden People - Katharine Seaton - Shaylee Meets Black Annis

How I Make Music

The piece of music we're listening to in the background is called Shaylee meets Black Annis. It's a somber soundtrack which I wrote for the fiction podcast The Hidden People. Today, we'll break it down and get into why and how it was made. You're listening to How I Make Music, where behind the scenes musicians get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we break apart a song, soundtrack or composition, and give composers a chance to share some of the insights into how it was made. My name is Katharine Seaton. I'm a composer and sound designer from the UK, and this is How I Make Music.

IN THIS EPISODE

01:07 Welcome

Welcome back to How I Make Music Episode 76, Shaylee meets Black Annis by me, Katharine Seaton. Thanks for listening in. The Hidden People is a long format audio drama. In this episode, you'll hear me talk about Shaylee and Black Annis. These are two of the characters in the story. I first got involved with Dayton Writers Movement to make The Hidden People when they were looking for somebody to develop a sound world. I am primarily a musician. Sound design is definitely a second string to my bow.

02:11 Female sound design

There was a competition a year and a half ago run by an advertising firm who wanted to get more women into sound design. And the prize was a professional development course. On that course, I found out some new techniques and one of them was the use of contact mics on various surfaces. And they showed us how they put a contact mic on one of those big rubber birthing balls. The result was a creaky groan, sort of...I think it's like a tectonic plates moving under the belly of the earth sound. Maybe because they're underground, they can almost hear the earth moving under the soil. And I thought yes, I've not heard anything like it and I thought it was great. When I got home, I started incorporating these techniques into my composition. I used a contact mic on various items to create the sounds in this score. So rubbed my leather handbag and a blown up balloon with wet hands to get some of those creaking noises. I taped a microphone to my throat to get those swallowing sounds. This was about trying to get the earth swallowing Shaylee up. What do you listen to this piece at the end of this episode, see if you can spot some of those strange sound design elements.

03:55 Inside Shaylee

Within the series, there's a character called Shaylee. She's a mentally and physically dexterous survivor. Another character, Black Annis, is based on folklore. In the legend, she's a terrifying figure used by parents to scare their children into behaving. When Shaylee meets Black Annis, she's engulfed by a dark cave, as well as her own feelings of fear and sadness. Shaylee Meets Black Annis involves a lot of bringing the sound design in the series into the music itself. And I was able to use the sound design to try and reflect how she's feeling about that space. So it could be the sound in the actual narrative or it could be musical score because there's that blurring of the boundaries there.

05:00 Influences

When I got the initial brief that they wanted to incorporate the folk music that comes from the origins of the folklore, this story is based on, I looked into it. As an English person, I'm quite familiar with British folk music, just through living here and knowing that tradition, so that was all already in my sort of inside my ears. And I think in Shaylee's original theme, the fragments of strings that play under the melody might have been inspired by composers like Benjamin Britten in the first part of the 20th century of English music. Take a quick listen. I did spend some time doing the classic music composer thing of going on to YouTube and just finding what looks like authentic performances. And just listening for a bit and getting into that sound world.

The Irish folk

Support the show