I've now completed the sound for each of the 53 individual segments that make up the entirety of Watching Europa.
In the same way that the images of WE are not meant to address the literal reality of Europan lifeforms, the soundscapes are designed to be evocative of the vast extraterrestrial oceans of Europa without attempting to be realistic. To this end, I've based the sound on the kinds of things we hear in terrestrial ocean recordings and tempered it with a musicality that I hope will give the sound the kind of cohesion that I've attempted with the image's colour palette.
In my studio I am able to simulate the final Watching Europa presentation by running 13 individual clip loops on my screens. I am pleased to say that the idea, which was necessarily executed in abstraction, is very succesful in practice. I wish there was some easy way for me to demonstrate it for you, but this is one experience you'll just have to witness in situ.
For those who are interested, the principle sound creation tools for the Watching Europa soundtrack were Native Intruments' Reaktor, Spectrasonics' Omnisphere and Sonic Solutions' Synplant. For environmental colour, I made extensive use of the Line 6 Podfarm and Audio Ease's Altiverb (particularly the TL Space Colors and Impressions modules). The tracks were designed in Cubase and edited in ProTools.
All the sound is created in 5.0 surround, and this is what you will hear on the BluRay release. The exhibition will necessarily require stereo sound from each of the 13 sources.