A.I use my father’s memory. His car broke down when he was driving along in the mountain. He heard the howl of wolves from the dark mountain. He was scared, and thought of many horrible things. But he could do nothing except fixing his car as soon as possible and drive home quickly. Iwanted to conclude both the real surrounding sound and the sound that reveal my father’s inner activity. I asked my father about this memory, and I also imagined how I would feel if I were in the same situation.Finally I decided the order of the different component. As for how to mix to composite some pieces of sound to achieve certain effect, I did have some ideas from the beginning but most of them was got when I was mixing and trying.
B. (1)The project begins with the sound of wolves, which was edited from the sound of husky, a king of dog. The wolves’ howl is the trigger of all the emotions and memories, and the sound of husky is the sound that most close to the wolves howl in my consideration. Then is the sound of clothes friction and a bell’s sound. When I was imagining myself experiencing the same thing, I thought I would feel afraid just after hearing the sound, but it might take one or two seconds to really realize what happened and how scary it was. My heart might felt like shaking, which is the function of the bell. And then there were some dull tapping sounds, which was recorded when I was knocking the wall of a piano room, to intimate of sound of heart beating. I thought when people was scared, they would feel their heart beating easily, especially when the surrounding was extremely quiet. Then it’s a piece of mixed sound, which I wanted to reveal his imaginations. I mixed the sound of water, knocking and some noises of some machine and I wanted to create an effect of darkness and chaos, because he just thought of some horrible results and his mind was chaotic. Next was a chord of pipa, a Chinese traditional instrument, which means his emotion reach a peak. Then he calmed down, and some sounds of knocking on the metal can be heard, it was him repairing the car. Finally, he repaired the car successfully and started the car. The starting sound is composed by the sound of clipping the keyboard and the sound of scratching a iron fence. Some piano sound fades in and out, reveal his mixed mood after the horrible experience.
(2) Noise reduction was the effect that I use the most, and I used it in almost all the clips. For the wolves howls, I added an FFT filter and a convolution reverb to make it sounds higher frequency and from a distance. I also adjust the panning so that it could sound like the howl it’s from all directions. Then I edited the sound of clothes and the sound of the bell. Both of the volume was switched to be a little higher, and a echo was added to the bell’s sound. Next I edited the sound of heart beat. There are two different sound for it, one is slow, the other is relatively fast. I copied the fast more some times and linked them together and make the volume of these clips from low to high, to show that the heart beat became stronger and faster. The whole heart beat part was intended to fade in and out, so it could switch to his inner activity smoothly. For this part, I put different sound in different tracks, and added clip effect such as FFT filter, reverb, and guitarsuite. The volume of the machine sound was turned down while the volume of the water sound was turned up. Then I added the pipa sound and then it’s the sound of knocking metal. I used reverb and made it fade in. For the sound of the keyboard, I increased the volume and added reverb to make it sound more clear. And the piano sound was faded out. Finally I added an FFT filter, a multiband compressor and a mastering effect in the master track.
C. A challenge I met was that after adding echo or delay effect, there was a loud “si” or “sa” sound, and it couldn’t be reduced by adding denoise effect. Finally I thought these sound might have a certain frequency and FFT filter did solve the problem.
D.If do it next time, I would do more work on panning, and I would try to make the transition between different clips more smoothly.
