Lockdown Released?
Jean Zhang
Concept
The memory that I picked is the certain day that we were lifted from lockdown for the pandemic. On that day, I was taking online courses and doing my final review for my college entrance exams as usual in a fretful mood, but countless notifications from the phone of the neighborhood group chat let me know the excellent news. I took off my masks and threw them in the trash bin, opened the door, and ran out to breathe the fresh outdoor air we hadn’t encountered in a long time. I walked through the neighborhood with no destination in mind, perhaps just wanting to take a walk in this world of regained freedom. I heard children laughing and playing basketball, grannies gossiping in Shanghainese, bikes and cars driving out, and my feet stepping over fallen leaves on the side of the road, just letting go of my mind and enjoying the moment. Suddenly someone let out a cough and all the beautiful sounds came to a screeching halt again. Everyone seemed to hold their breath, looked to the same place, walked or ran back to their homes, and shut their doors again.
I aimed to show the different moods in that memory before and after the release of the lockdown and use a narrative way to explain the story by sound. I wanted to show the whole atmosphere by creating a mix of sound in certain environments.
Process
I prepared the checklist for the sounds that I would like to collect. I recorded some environmental sounds such as the sounds in the park (representing the sounds in the neighborhood) and on the road with stereo mode to make the surrounding sounds and give an immersive feeling to the audience. Also, I got the recordings of specific subtle sounds like yawning, breathing, typing, writing, and so on, mostly with shotgun and mono mode. I used the Tascam and the shotgun to record the sounds in mono and stereo modes. I found that the days that I tried to complete the recordings were really windy and there was a lot of noise in the recordings. Therefore, I borrowed the windshield and remade the recordings to make the sound clearer. Also, some sounds like walking on the leaf-covered road are hard to record in the outside environment. So I replaced the sound of walking with the sound of holding cups in hand and smashing them on scraps of paper.
For the editing part, I mix the different sounds together to create the whole atmosphere and transfer the feeling of the memory. For the first part, I used the clock sound to give a fretful and anxious feeling and used the panning effect to make the sound more interesting. Also, I used panning in the part of running from home to the outside world. With the editing of left and right, I wanted to create different spaces in the sound and show the difference between the two periods. For the second part, I used a combination of different sounds on the road to create an environment. I used the sound of footsteps and the sounds coming from different directions to give the audience a feeling of walking through different scenes. Also, I used quite a lot of effects to make the sound combination more interesting. I did some filters and reverbs for certain soundtracks to make them fit with the whole audio better. I found that most of my recordings had noise included, so I did the noise reduction a lot. Also, I tried a lot of different effects of panning, filters, and mastering in the editing process to make the work sound more balanced.
Conclusion
I got valuable feedback to further develop the project on the presentation day from my classmates and professors. Firstly I’d like to revise some of the sound recordings and develop some more interesting and experimental ways of creating sounds. Also, how the sound represents the story should be more reasonable. For example, the final part that the person should run from outside back to the home should be a more complete process and it would make more sense if the sounds running from one environment to another could be included.
Image of Audition
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