For this assignment, I chose my memory of being hospitalized in 2018. I remember being taken out of an ambulance on a stretcher through a set of doors and into a room. Next, I waited there as I slowly died, with my breathing becoming weak and heart-pounding until a group of doctors and nurses hurried in and cut into my chest, allowing me to breathe again. At the start, I tried to make the scene as obvious as possible, since the assignment said “A listener should be able to recreate the scene or environment while listening”. Using sirens, and general hospital noise, I set the scene. Next, I got a little more abstract with sounds of struggled breathing and heartbeats, which intended to convey the feeling of dying. During this part, the background sounds drop out, in order to give the feeling that the world is fading away, much like my life at the time. This is interrupted by a stream of doctors entering, with an overwhelming amount of sounds at once including speech and machinery. This conveys the snap back to reality that I had when the doctors came in. This section finally builds in volume and density, until it climaxes with some white noise into the isolated sound of steady breathing. In this section, I wanted a snap back to reality, but I also wanted the user to experience a sensory overload. When I was in the hospital and all the doctors came in, it really felt like a thousand different things were happening at the same time, and everyone was asking me to do ten different things at once. While one doctor took my blood pressure, another was inserting an IV into my arm, and another was setting up an EKG on my chest. It felt like a panic attack and I wanted to convey that in my sound with the white noise. However, when they finally cut into my chest and I could breathe again, the world was quiet once again. Not because I felt like I had died, but because the world was clear again, and I could breathe. The chief emotion I wanted to express in my sound was this clarity – so I chose to focus on my breathing sound.
For my sounds, I wanted to choose ones that were as accurate as possible to properly communicate the environment of the hospital. In order to get these sounds, I decided to record them at Shanghai East Hospital. Since I already go there every week for physical therapy, it was fairly easy to record the sounds of machines and such while I was there. In addition, I used some sounds recorded outside of the hospital. These were more general and not essential for communicating the environment – like footsteps, door sounds, and speech. For these, I recorded myself multiple times until I got a take that I thought was good. I used the school equipment for some of these, but for ease of transport, I ended up using my iPhone to record many of the sounds, chiefly the ones at the hospital. However, the quality of the sounds was good enough to edit and use.
While editing, I worked in linear order. I built sections in chronological order, and within each section, I built based on the main sound I wanted to hear in the mix. So for the first section, I wanted the siren to be the clearest sound, so I took out the background noise on it and added it first. After putting the siren in, I then build out the background sounds – the rain and footsteps. However, the siren is not always the most important sound in the first section, so I made the other sounds drop out a bit when I wanted to emphasize the door and stretcher sounds. Finally, when the listener is moved through the hospital doors, the sounds taking place outside – sirens and rain – slowly fade away. I used this process for all the other sections I made – first adding the main sound, then interrupting it with specific sounds I wanted to add. One problem I ran into while using this strategy was that some of the sounds got lost in the mix, since they overlapped in volume and frequency. In order to solve this problem, I utilized the panning, EQ, and effects functions to change the timbre of each different sound so the listener can differentiate them from each other. A good example of this can be heard during the “doctor” section of the sound, where the machine sounds are clear in the mid-high frequency range and the “speech” sounds are muted with effects and take place in the mid-low frequency range. This makes both sets of sounds audible at the same time. Another problem I faced was removing background noise from the sounds I recorded. This was a little difficult at points since the noise reduction program would chop off key parts of the sound itself. To work around this, I had to manually cut around the background noise of sounds like “rain” and “footsteps” to get the clearest sound possible. Overall, I learned the importance of getting the cleanest sounds possible, and the importance of using effects to create interesting sound texture.
If given more time, I would probably clean up the “doctor” sequence. If you listen closely, you can hear where I had to repeat sounds in order to reach the desired level of noise. Another part I would change is the entrance to the hospital. As of now, it’s kind of just an empty hallway with wheels and footsteps sounds. I would probably add more background sounds of a hospital lobby to help build the environment even more.
On presentation day, I received many different types of feedback. One that I agree with is that I could do more panning throughout the entire soundscape just to give it a more spatial feeling. Another criticism that I disagree with was that my sound scape wasn’t “abstract enough” and had too many “identifiable sounds” however, I think that adding more unidentifiable sounds would make the soundscape stray away from the guidelines of the project, specifically the aspect where the environment must be recognizable to the listener. One final piece of feedback that I received was that I could maybe add some audible dialogue to the project. I agree with this to an extent. While I personally feel like dialogue would enhance the experience, I would rather not risk breaking the rules of the project, which states that it cannot take the shape of voice narration.
Images of Audition:
