Artistic Process
​liminal lullabies - Noortje Fletterman
1 / Master Project Proposal
Introduction
The realization of a cohesive body of work has been a central goal throughout my creative studies at Willem de Kooning Academy, BIMM University, and the Popakademie. Over the course of my studies, I developed a broad range of skills in design, vocals, songwriting, composition, and music production, while building a diverse musical portfolio through both personal projects and collaborations.
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This master's project was therefore a great opportunity to bring these skills together by creating a 30-minute music project with a cohesive musical and visual identity. Throughout the project, I aimed to answer the following research question: How can I create a cohesive artistic world in which sound, text, and visuals come together as one experience?
To support this research question, I formulated several learning goals for myself:
1. Further develop composition and production techniques in (Hyper)pop, with influences from Ambient. The project aimed to explore a sound situated between Pop and Hyperpop, with influences from Ambient, while developing my composition and production techniques within these genres. By creating a questionnaire, I was able to investigate selected sources of inspiration and compile a list of musical parameters that could serve as a framework for creating my new music.
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2. Experiment with English-language songwriting and expand my songwriting practice beyond Dutch. I aimed to expand my songwriting practice by exploring English-language songwriting, moving beyond my previous focus on Dutch. This choice was also motivated by the possibility of pursuing my career in an international context in the future.
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3. Build a portfolio that can support future collaborations and commissions. Another goal of the project was to build a portfolio that would help me position myself more clearly as an artist and producer within the genres and musical styles I explored. By creating and documenting work within this musical direction, I aimed to develop a body of work that could communicate my skills and artistic identity to potential collaborators and clients. In the longer term, I hope this portfolio can create opportunities to collaborate with and produce for other artists working within similar genres and styles.
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4. Develop my ability to create a coherent visual concept for a musical project through the development of a brand book and cover artwork. An important part of the project was the development of a brand book, which was intended to define my artistic identity and establish a consistent framework for the music, visuals, styling, and communication surrounding the project. Through this process, I explored how sound, storytelling, artist persona, and visual identity can come together to create a coherent artistic world. The brand book also informed the development of the cover artwork and the overall visual identity of the project. Additionally, the brand book was intended to serve as a tool for communicating my vision to collaborators, helping me clearly convey the ideas, references, and visual direction I wanted to explore in this project.
5. Refine my creative process through reflection, experimentation, and iteration. In addition to developing the music and visual identity, I wanted to use this project to critically examine my own artistic process, particularly within the genres and musical styles I aimed to explore. I noticed that when working towards deadlines, I tend to struggle with procrastination, which can make the creative process feel more pressured and less enjoyable. Therefore, an important goal of this project was to investigate whether different tools and working methods could help me structure my workflow, overcome creative blocks, and experience the songwriting and production process in a more enjoyable and sustainable way. Experimenting with these tools consequently became an integral part of the project itself.
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​​​​​The resulting project was primarily intended as a learning and experimentation project rather than a release-focused project. While some of the music may eventually be released in the future, the release itself is not part of the master’s project. The primary focus was on the learning experience, artistic development, and exploration of my creative process.
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The final project was intended to consist of the following components:
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30-minute record
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Brandbook
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Cover artwork
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Documentation of the artistic process (this website)
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The following sections provide a step-by-step overview of how I approached my research question through the process of creating the 30-minute music project. The process is presented chronologically, documenting how I developed the music from initial ideas towards the final result. The steps in this timeline were not predetermined; rather, they developed through testing and experimentation throughout the project. By repeatedly trying different approaches, I gradually discovered which sequence of steps worked most effectively for me and eventually established a personal workflow that felt more intuitive and manageable, while also being specifically suited to the genres and musical style I aimed to explore. Under each step, I have documented the tools and methods I tested and used to move from an initial idea towards the final result.
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Now that the project is nearing completion, this documentation reflects on both the outcome and the process that led to the final result. It examines the choices I made, the tools and methods I tested, the challenges I encountered, and the extent to which the original goals of the project were achieved. In doing so, I also reflect on how experimenting with my creative process has contributed to my development as a creator.
2 / Analysis of references
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Bodega, Sega. I Created the Universe So That Life Could Create a Language So Complex, Just to Say How Much I Love You. Ambient Tweets, 2025.
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MQ, Casey. Later That Day, the Day Before, or the Day Before That. Ghostly International, 2024.
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Oklou. Choke Enough (Deluxe). True Panther Records, 2025.
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Polachek, Caroline. Pang. Perpetual Novice / The Orchard, 2019.
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XCX, Charli. Brat. Atlantic Records, 2024.
Key musical parameters
Through analysing some of my favourite albums, I identified several recurring musical parameters that I would like to implement in the music for this project. This music often uses clear, pop-oriented song structures, with tension created through layering, subtraction, repetition, and sharp contrasts. Motifs tend to be short and striking, developing through repetition, imitation, variation, and sequencing. Harmony is often static, with few modulations, allowing timbre and texture to take on a greater role in creating musical movement.
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Rhythm is predominantly based on 4/4 and club-oriented grooves. Drums often function as a source of energy and texture rather than simply driving the rhythm. The sound palette centres around synthesizers, drum machines, and heavily processed vocals, while acoustic instruments such as piano, guitar, or strings are used more sparingly to create softer moments of contrast. Production is treated as a compositional tool, with automation, filtering, effects, reverb, and delay shaping the structure and creating contrasts between dry and intimate or wide and ambient spaces. Finally, the lyrics often use surreal imagery, symbolism, and fragmented metaphors to create a distinct emotional world.
3 / Collecting
Listening as a songwriting skill​​​​​​
My mind works a bit like a radio station, constantly switching between songs and melodies from different channels, some of which exist and some of which I seem to invent myself. I try to keep my ears open and stay tuned in to what is happening within me, as well as to what is happening around me.​ I believe that writing interesting stories also comes from making interesting choices in everyday life and experiencing things I haven’t done before. I see this as a skill and try to practise it actively.
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For me, this practice - listening to both my inner and outer world - is one of the fundamental skills behind songwriting and composition. I see it almost as a spiritual practice: an exercise in staying awake, paying attention, and remaining present in the moment. Ideas, sounds, images, phrases, and stories are constantly happening in & around me, but they are easy to miss if I'm not paying attention. (This is also why I see AI as a potential shortcut that can interfere with my ability to listen. I’m therefore more skeptical than supportive when it comes to using AI in the songwriting process). For this project, I decided to listen to the stories being told to me at night. I had already been keeping a dream diary before starting this project, and I wanted to explore the symbolism behind the scenes I encountered in my dreams.​
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To capture my dreams, as well as other songs and stories that come to me, I have found & developed a number of tools and working methods that help me hold on to these ideas before they disappear. I like to imagine all these ideas as fish swimming in a lake: a lake of ideas. When the time comes to write, I don’t have to create something from nothing; I simply have to go fishing for the ideas I have already caught.
4 / Developing an album concept
With this project, I drew inspiration from my dreams and wanted to explore the meaning behind their symbolism. I took the surreal and often illogical nature of my dreams as a starting point for the album’s imagery and narrative. For analysing the symbolism in my dreams, I used Pamela Ball’s complete droomencyclopedie (2015). As I began collecting melodies, exploring different themes, and reflecting on my dreams, I noticed that many of them revolved around womanhood, the women in my family, and my own female lineage. This gradually became an important thread throughout the work, leading me to explore daughterhood, motherhood, and the beauty and complexities of female identity, as well as the ways in which experiences, emotions, and stories can travel from one generation to the next.
I also wanted the subject matter and atmosphere of the album to fit naturally within the genres of (hyperpop) and ambient music. The intense and vivid quality of my dreams felt like an interesting starting point for creating the dreamy and sometimes surreal atmosphere I wanted the music to have. The dreams I have tend to have a cottagecore-like quality, filled with elements of nature and a sense of intimacy and nostalgia. I therefore want to incorporate imagery of landscapes, plants, animals, seasons, and other elements of the natural world into the lyrics, sound textures, and visuals. These elements can function not only as descriptions of the dream world, but also as metaphors for emotions, relationships, memory, and the connection between generations.
Additionally, I wanted to experiment with how the qualities of dreams could be translated into sound. Rather than only trying to make the music sound “dreamy,” I became interested in more abstract questions: What does time sound like? What does space sound like? What does identity sound like? What does dream logic sound like? I wanted to explore how these concepts could be expressed through the choice of sounds, textures, effects, and mixing. This became a way of treating the production itself as part of the storytelling, rather than simply as a way of presenting the songs.
Through English-language surrealist lyrics and dreamy sonic worlds, the work aimed to create a space where the subconscious and the everyday can intertwine. The overall tone is introspective, conversational, gentle, and hopeful. Ultimately, I want to invite the listener into a world that feels both intimate and dreamlike, where personal memories, dreams, nature, and the experiences of the women who came before me can coexist.
In the image on the left, I am trying to organise and sort through all the ideas, concepts and sentences I have collected throughout the creative process. This way of working helps me see connections between different ideas and identify which themes, images, and lines fit together. I find this process particularly useful as it allows me to make sense of a large amount of material without immediately having to decide what will or will not end up in the final lyrics.
5 / Melody & Harmony
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My initial approach to songwriting was to write melodies first and then build harmonies around them, before moving into the DAW to produce the songs. Last March, I experimented with this process by spending half an hour every morning singing spontaneous melodies; a tool I started to call the morning melodies. I collected the strongest ideas, combined them, and developed them further, resulting in around 30 demos within a month. I then used a second half-hour each day to explore chords and harmonies for these melodies.
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Although this gave me a large amount of songwriting material, I found it surprisingly difficult to turn these demos into finished productions that captured the sound and musical parameters I had envisioned. I realised that, for the sound aesthetic I was aiming for, songwriting and production could not easily be treated as two separate stages. The sounds themselves needed to influence the musical ideas from the beginning.
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At the same time, the morning melodies exercise proved to be a useful tool for me. Even though I ultimately realised that melody, harmony and production need to interact more closely, I found that setting aside just half an hour each morning made songwriting feel very accessible and sustainable. It showed me that I can still create a meaningful amount of musical material by consistently carving out a small amount of time, even during busy periods.
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Another aspect that changed during this project was my approach to harmony. Chords had never been something I spent a lot of time consciously thinking about. They were usually quite automatic for me: I would find something that worked underneath a melody and move on. Since the lesson with Alex, however, I have become much more aware of the harmonic possibilities within a melody. I also read Der harmonische Farbeimer, which encouraged me to think more intentionally about different chord options and harmonic colours.
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As a result, I would return to my melody and consciously try different chords underneath it, rather than immediately settling for the first option that seemed to work. This became one of the things I genuinely enjoyed during the project. Exploring several harmonic possibilities sometimes led me to choices that were less obvious (to my ears) but created a more interesting relationship with the melody. This was an important learning point for me: harmony does not have to be something that simply supports a melody after the fact, but can be an active part of discovering and shaping the musical idea.
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Tools
6 / Producing demos
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As my usual way of songwriting didn't quite work this time, I decided to reverse my process. Instead of starting with a melody, I began experimenting with sounds and producing small sections directly in Logic. I would spend half an hour creating one section that felt sonically exciting, and use that as the starting point for a song. I also created my own sample pack and collection of sounds to develop a consistent sonic palette across the project.
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This shift taught me that, for this particular style of music, sound design can function as a compositional tool rather than simply being part of the production process.
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For the ambient parts and sonic tapestries I wanted to create to achieve a dreamlike atmosphere, I took a similar approach by deliberately creating a lot of chaos in Logic. During the Chaos & Ordnung lessons with Josh, we explored the idea of setting a limited amount of time and using that time simply to generate as much material and variation as possible, rather than trying to immediately create something structured. I applied this approach to my own production process by giving myself half an hour to freely experiment with sounds and ambient effects.
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I created and recorded my own sound material, including my voice, synthesizers, virtual instruments and guitars. Then, I experimented with heavily processing and transforming these sounds. By manipulating, layering, reversing, stretching, filtering, and distorting the recordings, I could turn familiar sounds into something more abstract and atmospheric.
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I used a combination of plugins that create and transform ambient textures, allowing me to generate layers of sound without knowing exactly what the final result would be. Afterwards, I could listen back, select the moments and textures that felt interesting, and shape them into more intentional sonic tapestries. This helped me approach the ambient elements less as something I had to compose from the beginning and more as a process of generating, discovering, and organising sound. Creating the tapestries this way was a lot of fun!
7 / Lyrics
Writing lyrics in English has always felt somewhat unfamiliar to me. I often had images, scenes, emotions, or concepts in my head, but struggled with how to translate them into something lyrical. The difficulty was not so much coming up with ideas, but finding a way to shape them into verses, choruses, or individual lines. I found myself having to learn how to move from an idea or image towards an actual lyrical form.
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Collaboration
One of the ways I tried to develop my lyric-writing skills was through collaboration. I co-wrote the songs mama and babygoat with Marjolein. Working with someone who has a strong background in poetry was incredibly helpful, inspiring and enjoyable. Her perspective helped me think more critically about my lyrics and my ideas about lyric writing, and showed me different ways of working with language, imagery, and phrasing.
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Tools
During the project, and after analysing the references for this work, I realised that I do care about telling a story and writing meaningful lyrics, but I also want the words to sound right. The phonetic quality of a lyric (the way the words feel in the mouth, how the syllables interact with the melody, and how the sounds contribute to the overall track) is extremely important to me. In pop music, and particularly in hyperpop, I feel that this can sometimes be more important than the literal meaning of every individual word. When I listen to this music myself, I usually notice the melody first and the lyrics second.
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For the kind of music I am making, lyric writing has therefore become less about starting with words and more about finding the right words for an already existing musical and emotional world. To help me write lyrics in this way, I developed a number of tools and working methods that allow me to explore the sound, meaning, and rhythm of words more freely.
​Collecting sounds, words,
phrases & concepts
Sorting ideas
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Developing ideas
8 / Final musical steps
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For the demos of the songs I played the parts on my classical guitar or used MIDI guitars to sketch out my ideas. These recordings were mainly intended to communicate the musical direction rather than to define the final guitar parts. However, I always encouraged Ion and Daan, who played the guitars on the tracks, to bring their own creativity into the process. If they had a different idea, heard something that could work better, or felt inspired to approach the part differently, I wanted them to have the freedom to follow that. Ion played the guitars on invisible friends, while Daan played the guitars on all the other songs featuring guitars.
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​​Another important part of the process was continuously checking whether I was still conveying the symbolism and feeling that I had originally associated with the songs, especially the ideas that came from my dreams. I kept moving back and forth between the lyrics, chords, melodies and production until everything felt coherent with the original idea.​ In this way, the production process became a continuous search for coherence: not only making sure that the individual elements worked on their own, but that they also worked together as a whole and still communicated the feeling and idea I had originally envisioned.
Over the year, Julian and I developed a concrete mixing workflow together. Initially, mixing felt like a very chaotic and overwhelming process for me. I often did not know where to start, and my projects were not always organised very clearly. Having a structured workflow and creative vision gave me more orientation and allowed me to break the process down into smaller steps without losing sight of the bigger picture. Because I found it difficult to objectively mix songs that I had been writing, producing and listening to for months, I asked Ion to look over my mixes once I had finished my own version. He would listen to them with fresh ears, make some adjustments where he felt they were needed, and send the mixes back to me. I could then listen to his version, compare it to my own, and make the final adjustments myself. After completing the mixes, I mastered all the songs.
9 / Visuals
One of the goals of this project was to develop a cohesive artistic world in which the sound, lyrics, and visuals feel connected. I wanted to explore how I could create a coherent visual concept for a musical project through the development of a brand book and cover artwork. The brand book was intended to define the visual identity of the project and provide a framework for its imagery, styling, colours, textures, and overall atmosphere. It also became a way of communicating my ideas for the artwork to any visual collaborators.
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I first spent a considerable amount of time developing the brand book myself, using a number of tools and methods I had learned from Natasha Brito. Once I had established a visual direction, I started experimenting with it in practice. I thrifted some nice dresses in Rotterdam. After, together with my friend Jabe who has a creative studio in Rotterdam, I tested different angles, textures, makeup, and clothing. These experiments helped me understand which elements of the brand book actually translated into images and which needed to be adjusted.
An important part of this process was also learning how to communicate my visual ideas to someone else. I eventually found photographer Elena Skurrat through Instagram. Her portfolio had a surreal quality that suited the direction I was looking for, while the colours and atmosphere also aligned closely with my brand book. I was able to send her my brand book and moodboard beforehand, which gave us a shared starting point for the collaboration. The test shoot also helped me communicate more precisely what I had in mind and understand how to translate the abstract ideas from my brand book into an actual photograph.
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For the final shoot in Hamburg, we eventually decided to create an image of me swimming out onto Bahrenfelder See on an air mattress, wearing a light pink pyjama dress. This combined several of the elements I had been exploring throughout the project: surrealism, softness, dream imagery, and an everyday setting transformed into something slightly unreal. The process showed me how a visual concept can develop through a combination of planning, experimentation, and collaboration, rather than being fully defined from the beginning.
On the left is the final artwork;
on the right are some of the ideas we tried.
Brandbook​​
10 / Final Tonträger
11 / Evaluation
Looking back at the project, I feel that I achieved the goals I set for myself at the beginning of the year. One of my main goals was to find and develop more tools for composition and production within (hyper)pop with ambient influences. Through experimentation, I developed new ways of creating ambient textures and tapestries, particularly through the Chaos and Ordnung lessons from Josh, which encouraged me to work more intuitively.
More importantly, these tools helped me start developing my own sound. I now have a much clearer sense of what I personally like and what feels authentic to me. make me feel loved, echoes, flock of birds (longing for you) and wildflowers in particular feel strongly connected to my artistic identity. Creating a sample pack also helped me develop a more consistent sonic palette, which created a sense of cohesion between the different songs. I became particularly interested in using granular processing for ambient tapestries, I really like the vocal chain in echoes, and I love the distorted vocals and guitars in make me feel loved.
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Moreover, the small exercises and different working methods I experimented with helped me work more consistently and made the project feel more manageable. They allowed me to stay engaged while still leaving enough space for experimentation and unexpected ideas.
I also feel that I made significant progress in my English-language songwriting. Throughout the project, I became more comfortable writing intuitively and trusting my own instincts rather than questioning whether something was “right” or “wrong”. This allowed me to draw more freely from personal experiences, emotions and images from my dreams, and to give the songs a more personal character. I tried different songwriting styles: some songs are more narrative, like babygoat, while others, like wildflowers, are more abstract. Although there is no right or wrong, I tend to enjoy the abstract songwriting more, and I think it fits my project, as well as my future projects, better.
Although the songs each have their own identity, they feel connected through their sound and atmosphere. The visual part of the project also taught me how to intuitively develop a visual identity that supports and connects to the music. I now feel more confident about creating visual concepts for future projects.
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There are still areas I want to develop. In particular, for my next projects, I want to carve out more time to mix the songs and practise mixing more regularly. Although I learned a lot during this project (especially when it comes to gainstaging correctly and reverbs), and I really spend time formulating a creative vision for my mixes, I still see mixing as an area where I can grow significantly. For example, I made a note to myself that I need to pay more attention during the composition process to avoid having too many instruments occupying the same frequency spectrum. While mixing songs such as echoes and make me feel loved, I noticed that I ended up having to remove quite a few pads, or that the synthesizers and guitars were competing for space in the mix. With songs like koi fishes, I had intuitively done this better, which also made the mixing process much easier. This is something I have taken away from this project and will pay more attention to in future compositions. Moreover, in future projects, I want to give myself more time for mixing my songs and become more confident in my own mixing decisions.
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I am genuinely very happy with what I have created. I feel grateful that I had the time and space to experiment, make detours and discover more about my own artistic identity. I am also grateful to Marjolein, Daan and Ion for creating with me. And of course, thank you, Alex and Florian, for sharing so many inspiring techniques and ideas with me. Your guidance played an important role in helping me develop this body of work, and I am very grateful for it!