Memory Soundscape Blog Post
By Mia Date: 11/8/2020
Concept
My memory soundscape actually came from my personal experience which had a great impact on my life. This is my first journey as a volunteer teacher. When I went there, the floods had just ended, but there was still going to be heavy rain. And unfortunately, this just happened to me. I found that the original road had been flooded with water. So, I hesitated whether to go to school or not. Finally, I decided to go to school, because I had to be responsible for my students. On my way to school, I was struggling with taking my steps, even still wondering whether my decision was right or not. But, when I was about to reach the school, the laughing from the kids in the school could be clearly heard, which made me feel that what I’ve done was really deserved. Walking into the school, shaking off the water from the umbrella, and taking a deep breath, I rang the bell to begin the class.
I aimed to convey the actual sounds to my audience, letting them immerse the real environment that I had experienced.
The experience impressed me greatly, due to children’s’ passion for gaining knowledge and insistence without considering the horrible weather condition, which motivated me to continue this project until now. This is what I want to deliver to others. As we now all living in relatively advanced cities, we can get easy access to those we want, like education, which may be difficult for other kids to gain. We have to cherish what we’ve possessed now, and take what we get and put it to good use to give back to society.
Process
- In general, I used the sound of heavy rain, thunderstorm, and a little bit of heavy wind to create the feeling of extremely bad weather conditions. And at the end of the soundscape, I chose to apply the sound of kids’ laughter and the school bell to do a contrast to the previous horrible sounds, which has an atmosphere of hope. At the beginning of the soundscape, I use a zipping sound to imply that I was doing my preparation for going to school. Then, I expressed my shock at the heavy rain outside by slamming the door. A deep breath indicated that after some psychological struggle, I got up the courage to step out to school. During the process of going to school, I use the unstable sound of walking through the water, and my heavy breathing to show my hardness and struggle to go to school. Also, I use the sound of walking on the mud and wet ground to make it as a transition between getting out of the room and walking through the water. To indicate that I reached the school, I used the sound of closing and dumping the water.
While I was doing my recording, I’ve met a lot of problems, because the teacher did not allow us to record any sounds downloaded from the Internet at first. So to record the sound of the heavy rain, I went to the bathroom to record it, however, it didn’t really sound like the heaving rain. Therefore, I decided to use my umbrella and made it under the faucet to create the sound of heavy rain. The thunderstorm was created by moving the recorder near to the umbrella while recording the sound of heavy rain, however, it was a little bit noisy, and I made it more comfortable to listen to by editing and mixing it with the real sound of a thunderstorm from Adobe. Initially, I determined to record the sound of boating, however, my basin was too small to create such kind of sound, so I changed my ideas to imitate the sound of walking through the water by letting my hands up and down through the water, which I thought was also suitable to create the atmosphere that I wanted. In addition, I failed to record my deep breath, because the original one consisted of too much sonic boom, so after asking the fellow, I used the vertical microphone to deal with this problem. Last but not least, in my opinion, I think the most difficult sound that I’ve recorded is the sound of laughter from the kids. It was too noisy and even a little bit scary, because I recorded it outside. To address this problem, I had no choice but to download the sound effect and edit it.
- For my editing process, I think I also meet with some problems. First of all, when I did my editing first, I found that the time of my composition had exceeded the time limit too much, so I revise repeatedly to reduce it to less than a minute. Also, I found it difficult to combine the sound of the rain, wind, and thunder well. One careless will make the sound too much, can not hear clearly what is. So, I just tried different arrangements and effects and then picked up one that I thought was quite appropriate. Furthermore, since I wanted to use the echo of the old school bell to end my soundscape to make more imagination for the audience, however, I failed to use the effect of echo well, so I just cut the sounding when the bell was approaching to end and combined them to create the effect of an echo. During the process of editing, I face the same problem in the recording that the laughter from kids was too difficult to produce. I downloaded the effect of a woman’s laughter and adjusted it into a higher pitch form to make it alike to the kids’ ones.
In the process of editing, I have learned plenty of skills for combining the sounds and editing the sound by different effects to create a new kind of sound.
Conclusion
If I have more time, I will definitely practice my skill to use audition. And according to the feedback on the presentation day, I will reconsider what is the most important part of this memory, because this experience was filled with too many contents, which cannot be clearly delivered to the audience. Also, I will rerecord my sound of kids’ laughter, which is still a little bit weird now. Furthermore, I will do some changes at the end of the soundscape, making it clearer for the audience to get the feeling of hope, peace, and love.
Image of Audition
Audio File