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This week, I made progress on the Kembang Rawe remix but encountered many challenges. I wanted to make sure I was handling the cultural elements of this track with care, especially because it’s a song I grew up listening to at weddings and family events. Involving my family in the feedback process felt important, especially considering my late great grand-aunt was one of the composers of the Indonesian national anthem, Ibu Sud. Her legacy made me want to do this as authentically as possible.

When I first played the remix for my relatives, their response was honest: it sounded too close to the original, more like a re-edit than a true remix. That critique pushed me to rethink the track’s identity. I turned to a niche subgenre I often come across on my TikTok “For You” page, which were dangdut remixes made with sped-up vocals and warped textures, usually made for viral edits or meme videos.

Inspired by this digital folk culture, I started experimenting with tempo shifts, filtered transitions, and layering in street sound samples from the recordings I made with the new mic. The result began to feel more exciting, while still familiar but reimagined through a more modern, digital lens. This moment taught me that tradition and innovation can co-exist when you understand the concept of both.

Before the Christmas holidays, I managed to finalise Actor completely and got all the mixing and mastering finished. I felt proud of the final outcome and confident about the direction of the rest of the project. While in Indonesia, I also began collecting sound recordings from street vendors, especially during peak hours when everyone gathers together after Maghrib. I was so happy to be there during the New Year’s holiday when the markets were particularly active and full of life.

Unfortunately, when I played the recordings back at home through my speakers, they sounded muddy, distorted, and completely unusable in a professional context. This was a major setback. I had been looking forward to working on the Indonesian track next, and this unexpected audio issue really threw me off creatively and emotionally.

To fix the problem, I researched microphone types suitable for field recording and ended up ordering one online with decent user reviews and a portable form factor. With this new mic, I revisited a few markets to re-record the ambience, this time with much cleaner results. I also began testing a few of the new samples inside the Kembang Rawe remix, though I still haven’t fully found the right direction for the sound yet. Unfortunately, I’ve made the decision to put the production of Case on hold for now as my creative focus has shifted toward the Indonesian track, which I felt really motivated to work on.

This week, I was in the process of mixing and mastering for Actor. I focused on cleaning up the ambience layers, controlling dynamic peaks, and finalising the stereo image to make sure it translated well across different playback systems. Hearing the full mix come together made the concept of Sonic Kitchen feel successful for the first attempt. It felt like the identity of the project was becoming real.

After wrapping up Actor, I started experimenting with the next track: Case by Diljit Dosanjh. The song is full of rhythmic energy and confidence, which poses a different kind of challenge than Actor did. I’ve begun digging through Indian street vendor footage to build a sample bank of percussive food prep sounds from the clinks, chops, and layered vocals that will interact well with the Bhangra beat.

At the same time, I’m planning ahead for my field recording trips. I’ll be in Indonesia during Christmas and Japan over the Easter holidays with my family. I’m hoping to capture authentic sounds directly from vendors in both places. I want these recordings to be more than just background noise, I want them to contribute in telling a story about each environment.

The first track I worked on was “Actor” by Tong Li. I started by making my own remix of the song, keeping Tong Li’s original vocals and guzheng parts but reshaping the whole vibe to feel more ambient and emotional. I used Logic Pro to strip back some of the instrumental layers, added soft textures, and played around with the panning and dynamics to build atmosphere. I wanted it to feel cinematic, almost like you’re floating in and out of her world. I also EQ’d the track to carve out space around her voice so it sat clearly in the mix, as her voice has such a delicate tone, I didn’t want to bury it.

Once that was done, I started layering in street food sounds I found from videos of Guangdong markets from Mark Wiens. I wanted the track to feel like she was singing live in the middle of a real street with sizzling, vendors shouting, and the clatter of plates. I used EQ and sidechain to blend the ambience in softly under the beat, so it felt natural, not forced. The point wasn’t to turn it into a “beat,” but more like background life happening around her. It was the first time I realised how powerful ambient sound could be when used intentionally. I thought that it really brought the whole concept to life.

My vision now felt clearer as I am going to remix traditional songs using food vendor samples to reflect the culture’s rhythm and unity. With YouTube being my best friend at this point in the project, I started scouting for songs to use for my remix, keeping in mind the vibe, instrumentation, and food environment.

Within a week, I finalised the five songs I will be remixing for Sonic Kitchen:

China – Actor by Tong Li. I chose it because it’s emotional but still upbeat, and her voice has this clean tone that feels rooted in tradition yet contemporary enough to play with.
India – Case by Diljit Dosanjh. I chose it because Bhangra is so full of life, and this track in particular has a kind of rhythmic confidence that made it easy to build around.
Indonesia – Kembang Rawe by Nella Kharisma. This one was personal because I’ve heard it at almost every wedding and family event growing up. And it holds a lot of nostalgia for me and my siblings.
Japan – Sakura Sakura by @sakurassongs on YouTube. I found it whilst browsing through the website and I loved its soft and delicate, and I wanted to challenge myself by remixing something so minimalist and turning it into the complete opposite.
Spain – España Cañí performed by the Philharmonic Wind Orchestra. Watching the Philharmonic Wind Orchestra as a child also felt nostalgic to me as I remembered its theatrical and almost cartoonishly bold arrangements. I liked the idea of clashing it with something as humble as street churro vendors.

I started organising all my samples by country and tagged each sound with a category like “bass,” “percussion,” or “drone” to make my sessions smoother and easier to deal with on Logic.

After some trial and error, I decided to shift the structure of my project quite significantly. Originally, I planned to create entirely new songs from scratch, where I would be combining my own compositions with traditional techniques specific to each country, layered with cooking sounds. But I quickly realised how much time it would take, and especially to learn and recreate traditional styles authentically within such a short timeframe was not something I knew I could do.

Now my plan is incorporating field recordings of street vendor environments instead of kitchen ones into these remixes, including social conversations, clattering pans, and ambient street noise. I chose to keep only five countries out of the seven: China, India, Indonesia, Japan, and Spain. Even though I mostly explored Asia with these choices, these countries gave me a strong sense of sonic textures and street food environments to work with without overloading myself. This new approach still allows me to explore culture and sound, but in a more focused and achievable way. To restart my sourcing material, I ended up calling my dad and asking him to give me a list of Youtubers he watches (because I know he is obsessed with food culture just as much as I am). He included Youtubers such as Mark Wiens and Alin Food Walk, and I ended up finding the right kind of soundbites from their videos. 

This change helped make the project feel more cohesive and realistic while still aligning with my original goals of blending food culture with music. I’ve started collecting samples and sourcing high-quality recordings of traditional tracks that are well-known in each region.

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.

Following the initial brainstorming phase, I finally solidified my idea and gave the project a proper title: Sonic Kitchen. The concept merges two of the topics I would like to explore in music production, which are global culture and unconventional sound design, by using cooking sounds as the foundation for tracks inspired by different traditions from different countries.

While brainstorming ideas for the project, I made a list of ten countries I was most drawn to. For each country, I researched the various types of musical genres I could potentially work with. For example, Spain brought to mind the rhythms of flamenco, Japan offered textures from city pop and traditional instruments, and with my heritage being from Indonesia, their rich dangdut and gamelan sounds felt like an exciting creative challenge that I wanted to give myself. The other countries included China, India, Lebanon, Jamaica, the USA, Thailand, and Wales.

As I had my timeframe in mind, I narrowed the list down to seven countries: Spain, Indonesia, China, India, Lebanon, Jamaica, and the USA. I felt these offered a diverse range of both food culture and musical influence to explore and sample from.

I also created a timetable to help structure my process. Although I know sticking to it precisely would be difficult, it gave me a framework to stay somewhat on track. Presenting my Element 1 proposal in class helped affirm that the idea had potential and the feedback was positive, which gave me more confidence moving forward.

Since I didn’t decide to go down the pop album route, I started thinking more deeply about the things that genuinely interest me, such as musique concréte where unconventional sounds are used to compose music. Ever since studying music in GCSE’s, I have always been invested in how everyday sounds could be turned into something rhythmic and musical. With that being said, I, along with a lot of my friends, were cooking regularly at home, and being in that atmosphere made me think of a new proposal. 

 I wanted to film them as well as myself while we cooked, with the intention of collecting the natural sounds from those sessions and incorporating the chopping, sizzling, and clinking plates to use them as raw material for my production.

Coming up to the presentation of the first element, I was still unsure about the entire idea and if I was going to be able to achieve it. However, as I was creating the presentation and coming up with more ideas, I became more motivated when I realised that I get to explore areas like the sound, culture, and creativity through unconventional methods. I knew I didn’t want to follow a traditional approach like I have done in the past, but to challenge myself in the process to kind of prove it to myself that I could do it.

At first, I thought I was going to do something very personal for my Final Major Project, such as a bedroom or indie pop album inspired by the lyrics I had written over the past few years. I had a concept in mind called Unwritten, where I’d sing on the tracks and possibly collaborate with classmates or friends I had used to sing with from back home. It felt like the most natural plan at the time, and the context made it personal, emotional, and easy to connect with.

But then I started seriously thinking about what I want to do after university and studying. As much as I love writing lyrics and performing, I realised I don’t see myself pursuing life as an artist or front-facing performer. I’ve always been more interested in the behind-the-scenes production or branding. So while the idea of Unwritten made sense emotionally, it didn’t align with where I’m trying to go professionally.

That thought process made me re-evaluate the kind of project I actually want to showcase to someone like a future employer. I kept going back to the kind of work that blends sound and narrative, and I thought of things I could work towards in the future like title sequences, sonic branding, and basically audio identity. Because of the shows I watch, I always talk about how a show’s title sequence practically creates an identity for the show. With that being said, Nicholas Britell (Succession) and Cristobal Tapia de Veer (The White Lotus) are amongst a line of composers who do the job terrifically. That suddenly became the real inspiration and primary foundation of my project.