John McKenna

Tech Art &
Sound Design


Sound Projects


I have many years of experience in audio production. I studied Music Technology at UWS in Scotland, and since then have become proficient in Reaper, Protools, SoundToys plugins, FabFilter plugins, and Izotope Ozone 9 suite. I love creating with granular synthesis and modular synthesis.
 

Sound & Music for Games


Between 2018 and 2020 I was creating sound and music for students at Game Assembly, working to their project’s needs and working to their specifications. I enjoyed being able to help out and deliver things quickly that could be iterated on but I also wanted to be more involved in the full process. It was this experience that lead me to study Tech Art at the Game Assembly.

Coldheart





Here are some sounds for this project:

A highlight in the sound design for this project was the monster vocal sounds were created by granulating samples of random phonemes then processing them with SoundToys crystalizer amongst other effects.


Aniara


I created sound and music for their space shooter game, which I found challenging because I was very conscious that there is no sound in space. I’m happy with the dramatic music created for this game but less satisfied with the dampened SFX, in hindsight I would have negated realism for giving players the feedback they expect. All the SFX were synthesized on a Korg Monologue which was a cool challenge.





SFX for the Aniara project:







Music & sound design for a WIP cinematic in another space shooter game:





  Here are some musical soundworlds for games made 2018 - 2020:





Radio from 2020 

Interview with musician Michael Hurley I produced for Kit Records on NTS Radio. It is a simple telephone conversation with curated songs.


Podcast work from 2019


I produced a series of podcasts for an art project in Malmö called Whose Museum. I interviewed the artists and investigated the history of the project, my main focus was the atmosphere and subtly dramatizing each episode. I enjoyed playing with what a podcast is. I was most happy with the final episode where I was playing with mutating and transforming the atmosphere using spatialisation of the voices and changing the intimacy of the voices in relation to the speech and the soundtrack.



Undermedvetenheten

released 2020



This album was the first album I recorded, produced and mastered completely myself. I have worked a lot in Protools before but this one was using only the DAW Reaper.  For mastering I used the Izotope Ozone 9 suite of plugins. The music was created in VCV Rack or Tidalcycles musical programming language.

The concept and visual style was conceptualized with Richard Greenan from Kit Records inspired by alchemical attempts to create a homunculus. Once we settled on the cover image as a minimal face we decided to bring it life by making a chatbot as well as invited the visual artist Francis Patrick Brady to write a live-action-role-play (LARP) game together for it based on Harry Martinsson’s ‘Aniara’:


We commissioned Kate Compton to develop the chatbot for the LARP.  My responsibilities were scripting the chatbot’s conversational side. I’ve been using Kate’s programming language Tracery to make twitter bots so it was a natural progression to commission her services to build the chatbot puppetry. It is also the debut of her next language called Chancery, which delves into the world of conversational bots.

You can visit the chatbot here http://mima.chat

I created the sounds for Mima by manipulating different animal sounds, like swans and geese.
The ambient noise was inspired by a passage from Carl Jung’s Dreams, Memories and Reflections.

The album Undermedvetenheten is released via Kit Records, Lost Map Records and The Foundation of the Teacherock.


The Foundation of the Teacherock


The visual artist Francis Patrick Brady and I formed this label/platform for projects dealing with play and sound during our residency at Inter Arts Center in Malmö during 2019. We collaborated on a project called Leif JF Callioscott about the work of a fantasy psychologist. This resulted in a public event at Inter Arts Center where we invited adults and children to play and experiment with sound with guidance from the workshop we wrote. These experiments led to the creation of a radioplay which appeared on Resonance FM, Radiophrenia Glasgow and NTS radio. In preparation for the main event we did 10 workshops with adults at PLX: Hotellet.

We released the workshop for people to play at home:
https://foundationoftheteacherock.bandcamp.com/





Sound and Art projects Francis and I worked on together before the Leif Project at Inter Arts Center:
Signal Gallery / scifi audioguide for the botanical gardens in cph: A Foreigners Guide to Deathworld
Moderna Museet / A secret society dinner :https://francis-patrick-brady.co.uk/Feast-of-the-Red-Herring
ALT-CPH/ A meditation for “making gold”: https://francis-patrick-brady.co.uk/Golden-Bastard-ALT-CPH