Crystal Boyuan Zhang
Go Home
Concept & Design
I gained the initial idea from the Memory Landscape. I was planning to tell the story of my childhood with my grandparents at home – the normal, yet sweet environment of being at home after school in the autumn afternoons. However, as I moved on to the final Memory Soundscape project creation, I realized that this story lacks the contrast, ups, and downs. I wanted to create intensity, conflicts, and contrasts through dramatic variations of interesting panning, volume changes, effects, reverbs, and space. The initial plan then seems a bit plain.
Based on the general theme of going home, I specifically picked the memory during my senior year in high school when I live in a boarding school quite far away from home. Each month, I went back home by high-speed train. Home, a place once was the warmest place with my grandmother’s cooking, the bird chirps from the garden, and the breeze that flips over the pages of my book became a place that made me anxious and depressed due to the intense family issues. With the addition of the immense pressure from college application, academics, and especially my parent’s high expectations, I was scared of going home during that particular time.
In my Memory Soundscape, I started the 30-second clip with the sound of the train to represent the traveling journey from school to home. By gradually adding the layers of the close sound of the passing vehicles and my dog’s distant barks that can be heard on the street before I step back home, I increased the intensity of the music to show my tangled thoughts and noises in my ears while I am going home. After the sound of the stopping train, I muted all the soundtracks, representing the arrival at home. In the next part of the Soundscape, the sound starts with the gradual entrance of the ticking clock in a narrow space showing a closer space of being at home. The rhythmic sound of my grandmother’s footstep wearing her homemade slippers was mixed with the sound of the clock, further representing the normal feeling of home. In the background, the distant sound of TV shows in the television from my grandparent’s room is what I can usually hear in my room. Then, the intertwined sounds of further close-up clicking pen on desk and grandmother’s cutting scissors create a rhythm that simulates the heartbeats, showing my emotional state of going home. With the gradual addition of effects, the intensity of the emotions reaches the peak as the volume also reaches the maximum point and the space of the sound is the closest. In this part, the mix of sounds started with normality and regularity. However, they gradually distort to show the difference of my emotions of going home between past and present. After the climax, the close-up sounds diminish with some remaining distant background noises of the TV, pencil writing on paper, and distorted sound of slippers. In the ending, the sound of vehicles and train replays showing me leaving home and the ending of the memory retrace. The beginning and the end echo with each other, creating a loop. The arrival and leaving of the train also represent the starting and the end of a dream – the journey of going home was like an intense nightmare for me back then. I used a lot of unrealistic, alien-like sounds creates a dream-like effect further reflecting the absurdity of my life during that time.
Process
The process I created the final Memory Soundscape did not encounter many difficulties since I was preparing the final project through the small audio exercises. I started the process by recording the sound clips in Exercise II: Imaginary Sound Objects. Since I have already decided to represent a setting at home, I collected the first set of sound materials at home. I recorded sounds in close space such as pencil writing on paper, the paper turning of books, the cutting sounds of my grandmother’s scissors, the sound of frying eggs in a pan, and the sound of clicking pens. I also included sounds in medium space: the sound of walking on the wooden floors wearing slippers and the running water tap in the kitchen. To add in more layers for the future project, I recorded the sounds in larger spaces such as the distant sound of the TV show from my grandparents’ room and the voices of my grandparents’ talking in Shanghai dialects.
I explored the effects, reverbs, and all the different functions in Exercise II, adjusting the three chosen sound clips: the walking sound wearing slippers, frying egg sound, and the light sound of a pencil writing on paper. A lot of them were very different from the original sound. For example, the frying egg sound was like heavy rain dripping on plastic sheetings. That meets my expectation of creating a particularly unrealistic and distorted memory.
Taking these as the starting point, I started the creation of my final memory Soundscape sound clip. Since the setting of the first round of source recording was only at my home, I planned to record more sources from the train station – where I went very often during high school, traveling back and forth between home and school.
After gathering all the materials that I need, I planned the emotion line, with one rising point, a drop to silence, gradually moving to climax and fading into the end. The line will form a double-hump wave with the second higher and steeper.
The entire process of creation was quite intuitive for me – things just came to me what I want in the next second based on the previous sound clip after a lot of attempts. Therefore, the process went smoothly.