Concept

Since my parents have always been busy at work, I started to learn how to cook starting in middle school. Of course I started from the basics which was cooking noodles. Once quarantine started, I no longer had to cook noodles because my parents would always cook for me. This memory soundscape is basically about a dream I had about cooking noodles but waking up to my parents cooking breakfast for me during quarantine. That feeling was a good and heartwarming feeling because as soon as I woke up, I had food on the table. It is also a very nostalgic feeling because now, my parents are back at work and I either don’t eat breakfast or just have a bowl of milk and cereal which isn’t half as good as their food. 

Process

When it thinking about cooking, the first words that come into my head would be boiling, water, stove, timer, etc. I tried my best to incorporate these sounds into my memory soundscape so it sounds like the listener is there and listening and watching me cook noodles.  Boiling always takes the longest time when cooking so the sound of the water boiling is present in more than half of my memory soundscape.  As for the alarm/ timer, I wanted to incorporate that because it both shows that the noodles are ready and my alarm trying to wake me up in the morning which meant that me cooking noodles was actually a dream. I used a lot of echo for the boiling sound so it sounded like the water kept on boiling. I also used reverb for higher perched sounds to emphasize them. But most importantly, I used a lot of panning and I think that’s what made my project come together. By using pan, I was able to make the sound travel left to right and vice versa.

A problem I encountered during this project was the continuous echo sound after my soundscape had ended. I did not know how to make the audio end so I had about 25 seconds of constant echo of  noodles boiling. 

Conclusion

I got feedback from Professor Inmi about how I was able to make the soundscape sound more like a dream as well as how I could have recorded sounds from a further distance so not everything is upfront. If I had more time, I would take Professor Inmi’s advice and lower the sounds in the background so when the alarm rings, it would seem more like a dream. I personally do think it was hard to tell that it was a dream because of the way I edited the audios. Additionally to make the project better, I would have recorded more sounds and experimented with more effects to make the memory soundscape more interesting.