Memory Soundscape
A. Concept
The project’s concept is basically telling a love story. In the very beginning, the girl was typing on a computer to express her love. The phone’s bell showed the love story has begun. In the main part, the laughter and sobbing showed their happiness and pain during the relationship, and the turning pages’ sound was used to show the different stages that the girl and boy have gone through (As the Chinese saying “翻篇了”). After all the quarrels, the page finally turns into the boy and girl singing together, which means that they are still living happily.
And of course, this is a piece of my own memory.
B. Process
At first, my idea was to remake the circumstances of a scene, that is the time I walked from classroom to playground back in high school time. However, after communicating with the professor, I realize that the project should not remake a scene, but use sounds to create an environment. Thus I changed my idea to using sound to show my emotion, which I think is more challenging and meaningful.
The relationship is a complex thing, and I found that cannot use only one emotion to conclude it. So at first, I tried to use different sounds to create the emotion, such as using birds, wind, effervescent tablets, heartbeat, and so on to show the happiness; using rainy, trash, elevator falling, and so on to show the sadness. But it was too abstract to show the things I want to express. That’s why I decided to add the human sound to it, such as laughter and sobbing sound.
During the creation process, I also met a lot of difficulties, such as I couldn’t use the download sounds, so I gave up using the heartbeat to be the base. Instead, I used the birds and wind to be the base to change the basement of the whole sound emotion. This is also a part of the surprise that came from the process I tried to solve problems. Because the place I could go to was limited, I can only record the birds’ sounds from my window, which were combined with the wind blowing sound. But I gradually learned how to separate the birds’ sound and wind sound, which then made me have the idea of using birds’ sound and wind sound separately to create different emotions.
The very last change of the project is adding on the boy’s sound. At first, I only want to record my own feelings about this thing, but soon I realized that a relationship is a thing between two people, not only myself. Using my voice only will make no sense on the project. So I asked my boyfriend to help me to record other pieces of sound. Since the laughter and sobbing sounds should be easily recognized while not that intentional, I had to teach him to achieve the sound I want. This is also a fun part of this project.
C. Conclusion
After listening to my classmates’ projects, I realized my project has a lot of weaknesses, and the professor and Tiger also pointed out that the sounds’ environment changed too fast in only one minute. I think the reasons are various. Part is that I still don’t have enough ability to achieve the goal, and part is that the thing and memory I pick are hard enough to operate. But I do not regret what I have done. Instead, I learned a lot of things through the process. I have tried most of the AU’s functions and got familiar with them, and I feel confident that next time I will do better. I think this is the most meaningful part of this project.
As for the improvement, I will think of how to use sound to create a more simple environment and emotion in only one minute, such as only using laughter and birds’ sound to show happiness. Or I should still work on my previous project, for I can use the complex sound piece to create a more accurate space and environment. But I’m satisfied with my idea of the turning pages sound. I think I would keep this creative mind to the future if there are needs.
D. Image of Audition
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