🎧Concept
My original idea was to create a sound memory of lazy and warm days after I woke up from a nap in elementary school. However, creating this soundscape needs to use too many musical elements, the sounds are relatively specific, and the mood has not changed much, so I decided to give up this idea and change my concept. In the Audition exercise, I captured some sounds, added some filters, and made a lot of unexpected sounds. Another memory of mine was aroused.
I was addicted to a game named Temple Run when I was a child. In this game, the player first escapes from a temple, with a monster chasing him behind him. He needs to constantly cross various obstacles to escape in a maze without end. If he is not careful, he may die because of hitting the obstacles or being caught by the monster. Here’s a video of this game. (The quality of the video might be bad though)
Since I was overly addicted to this game, one day I took a nap and dreamed that I became the one running in Temple Run. At first, I was trapped in a temple, surrounded by silence. I felt very lonely. Then, I ran out of the temple and kept running. I felt a beast chasing behind me all the time. I was scared and kept looking back, I felt it was getting closer and closer to me, then I hit a wall and the beast caught up with me. I woke up with a jolt and turned on the light. Half awake, I heard the wind outside my window and the sound of people playing outside, and gradually calmed down.
I wanted to show a feeling of loneliness through some crisp echoing sounds, and also similar to the chimes in the temple; to show a feeling of fear through a progressively stronger heavy bass and some fine eerie background sounds, and to show the monster getting closer and closer to me; then I wanted to have a partition to wake myself up, and then to add some fresh random syllables and some happy background sounds to show a gradually calm mood.
🎧Process
To be honest, I had never thought that the sounds I wanted to express were actually edited from these sounds.
The crisp, bell-like three tones at the beginning are actually edited from the sound of a fork striking a glass filled with water.
The recurring, gradually intensifying monster-like footsteps in the middle are actually edited from the sound of putting the bicycle’s foot brake down.
The eerie background sound is edited from the sound of turning over a book.
The loud sound was edited by the sound of turning off the lights.
This is followed by an unedited sound of turning off the lights as a break.
The final calm, wind-chime-like sound was actually the sound I made by swinging my own iron coat hangers.
The faint human voice was recorded when my friends were playing with a hand-grip ball in the room.
My recording equipment was very basic because all the microphones were already borrowed away at first when I went to ER. When I finally got one, I found that the cable connecting the microphone to the recorder was broken. I can only use the recorder to record directly. Since it is not windproof and does not have very good noise removal, the radio effect is not very good. I spent a long time recording relatively clean and large sound, and a long time in the editing process to remove noise and amplify the sound. I originally used the noise sample capture method to de-clutter, but that made the sound a bit odd, so I chose to use the Auto Fix tool to manually de-clutter to remove some of the background vocals, wind, and air conditioner running sounds.
One of the most important things I learned in editing sounds is to be bold and experimental. Adding filters, adjusting the size of the sound, and increasing the spacing between sounds can give us unexpected results.
🎧Conclusion
If I had more time to accomplish this task, I would probably try to record sounds of better quality with more complete recording equipment, record more sounds and add different filter effects to them to see how it works, and try to further increase the sense of space by changing the left and right channels.
In the final critique, Connie mentioned that the loud noise near the end was a little too loud, and Joe said that when he listened to it on headphones it was so loud that it made clips. It was one of the things I struggled with during the editing process, whether to turn it down or not. The sound is not between -6 and -3db. It produces a red bar when it plays out. But I didn’t turn it down in the end for the following reasons:
1)818 speakers: I heard Joe mention in the Audi Exercise class that the sound from the 818 speakers can be a bit muffled. So I wanted to amplify the sound a little bit so as not to affect the effect.
2)I wanted the sound to show the feeling of a huge crash or drop. I wanted it to achieve a creepy effect. In the dream was that great sense of fear that made me jolt back to reality. So, even if it emits clips, it doesn’t affect the effect I want to achieve.
3）I think the whole sound needs to have an ebb and flow and a sense of contrast. Calm only seems calmer after the loud noise. I wanted it to be different from both the back and front sound, jumping out so that it can contrast with the calm sound in the back and set each other off.
🎧Image of Audition
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