From American Internet Celebrity to God Among Men

172: Chapter 172 The Soundscape Curator and the Resonance in the KitchenFollowing K’s ”consistent” reply came a brief silence. Alex was not in a rush; he knew well that for research of that caliber, every minor verification might require a massive amount of subsequent work to solidify. He focused more of his attention on the world under the sunlight before him.

The wave of submissions for the ”Future Sounds” challenge gradually subsided, and the selected top 100 entries once again displayed breathtaking imagination. For their live stream announcement night, Alex and Taylor decided to set up the venue as a miniature ”Museum of Future Sounds.” They acted as tour guides, leading the audience to ”listen” to the future: someone used modular synthesizers to simulate the sound effect of switching modes on ”emotion visualization glasses”; someone used processed waterphones and metal sheets to create the background sound of an ”artificial ecological rainforest”; someone even submitted a noisy ambient track of an ”interstellar trade market” generated entirely by AI based on text descriptions, filled with an inhuman sense of strangeness and order.

The live stream was filled with futuristic fun, and Alex and Taylor’s commentary leaned more towards discussing the technological imagination and social implications behind the sounds. They even connected with a professor of sound design on the spot to briefly discuss the potential applications of these ”Future Sounds” in science fiction film and television production. The live stream concluded with the announcement of the next challenge theme—”Echoes of Lost Civilizations (imagine and create an iconic sound that a vanished ancient civilization might have possessed)”—pulling the timeline from the future back to the past and sparking heated discussion once again.

The first monthly progress sharing meeting of the platform’s ”Creator Incubation Program” was held at the Echo Vision headquarters. The three selected participants (Emily, who was creating a sound portrait for her younger brother; Carl, the ”Junkyard Poet” skilled at creating rhythms with mechanical waste; and Leslie, an ecological sound recordist focused on recording the sounds of endangered species in nature) showcased their interim results and the challenges they had encountered.

Alex and Taylor attended the meeting in person. They did not provide specific solutions, but instead, as ”creative partners,” they asked key questions to help the three clarify their ideas and mobilized platform resources (such as contacting experts in relevant fields, providing specific equipment support, and assisting in finding display channels) to support them. Seeing the light ignited in the eyes of these three ordinary people because their dreams were being taken seriously, Alex felt more accomplished than any number on a business report. This was exactly the core significance of him building this ”creative value amplifier” ecosystem.

The artistic direction for the Zack Snyder film soundtrack officially began. This was not just about selecting and sequencing tracks, but a deep ”sound re-narration.” Alex and Taylor spent a great deal of time watching the film repeatedly, stripping away the visuals and feeling the rise and fall of the story based solely on the sound. They decided not to arrange the tracks chronologically, but instead to build an independent auditory journey that could exist apart from the film, based on the core concept of ”Data - Memory - Consciousness.” Furthermore, they began creating that special ”Echo work.”

The inspiration came from that ”pure pathos and hope” Alex sensed when the Ark of Consciousness was activated. Instead of using sound materials directly from the film, they selected several sound fragments from the Echo Puzzle that were submitted by users and filled with a sense of ”fragility” and ”resilience”: the steady but faint beeping of a premature infant’s monitor, the rhythmic tapping of a survivor signaling through ruins after an earthquake, the rustling sound of withered plants in the desert persisting in the wind... Combining these with an extremely simple, constantly repeating, and slowly rising piano motif composed by Taylor, they created an instrumental piece titled 《Glimmer Nesting》. It stood as an independent piece, yet echoed the spiritual core of the film from afar.