Once I had solidified my plans for Sonic Kitchen, I had to source material to use for the samples, which were going to be cooking sounds I could extract and manipulate into music. I started by searching through YouTube, searching for cooking videos from different countries. However, I felt like I didn’t have the right keywords to find what I was looking for, and luckily I had Tiktok as a guide, as it led me to several videos of different chef influencers cooking up dishes from different countries. Some videos had captured the sound of the natural, ambient sounds of an everyday kitchen, which was part of my primary goal.
I started working on the first song using clips of creators cooking Indonesian food, such as Nasi Kuning and Martabak, and later on planned on using my friends to cook while I recorded them. Since I’m most familiar with Indonesian music, it felt like the natural place to begin. I wanted to focus on elements of dangdut, being a genre I’ve grown up around, and tried to find a groove using the sampled sounds. While I managed to get a basic feel going, I quickly realised that composing a full dangdut-inspired track from scratch was more difficult than expected, especially within the constraints of my initial timeline and the composing of other different countries.
That led to an important realisation that my original schedule was too ambitious. I reworked my timetable to be more realistic, allowing myself around 2–3 weeks to complete each track. It gave me more breathing room to experiment and refine each idea without rushing the process.
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