Inspiration
For this audio project, I had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted it to look and sound like. The inspiration for this came from one of the chapters from a book called âThe Night Circusâ in which the character finds bottles that allow him to experience different sensations despite not actually being there. I wanted to replicate that for our project – except with a focus on sound.
Visuals
For the visuals of this project, I wanted to make sure that the bottles were very distinctly different from one another; whether it was through different bottle sizes, colours and labels, I wanted every bottle to stand out and have its own âpersonalityâ in a way that also reflected the place it was from. For example, for Mexico, it was a âBohemiaâ bottle as this is a favourite of many of our Latino friends. Furthermore, we chose the homepage bookshelf to be very muted in terms of colour in order to emphasise the bottles to the users.
Once the user hovers over the bottles, they do a bit of shaking through an animation transform on CSS. This is done to not only communicate to the users that they should click/interact with it but also, it brings that âmagicalâ element as they arenât just ordinary bottles. When a bottle is selected, that is a zoomed in version of the bottle and is a lot more colourful. This was done in order to reflect a dream-like atmosphere. When the user hovers over the bottles, the bottle opens and the audio starts playing.
Audio
Similar to how the appearance of the bottles are distinctly different, we wanted to make the audios very different from each other as well. When the user hovers in and out, we made sure the music plays, pauses then continues, instead of it playing and starting over again from the beginning for a smoother listen.
The five different sounds we chose to focus on were: Manilaâs busy traffic, Ulaanbaatarâs countryside, Shanghaiâs streets, a Mexican bar and Italyâs summer. Whether it was living in those places or experiencing the place first hand, we have a personal connection with each of the audios, which meant we often looked for those specific sounds to include. Each bottle For example, for Manila, I wanted to include someone shouting âtaho!â as it was something I heard every day when I was back home. Whilst for Helen, she wanted nomads singing as this was what was usually heard in the countrysides of Mongolia. We wanted to not just have our audios to be âsoundscapesâ which was why we placed all of these sounds together with music from that specific country/place.
To ensure our audio noises sounded as authentic as possible, we went out to various places such as West Nanjing, metro and even a bar. The ones we couldnât record were found on YouTube and credited in our âaboutâ page. Helen did an amazing job combining all of the audios together that I was really happy how some of the audios, such as loud Shanghai streets, became surprisingly, very soothing to listen to.
Inspired by âtasting notesâ seen on chocolate bars, we decided to include âsound notesâ to inform users what were the different sounds they should be able to hear. In order to give further context to the user of our choices for our audio, we included a âmore infoâ section, just in case there are some specific cultural aspects that some users are not aware of and our inspiration behind each bottle.
Lastly, we included a homepage audio in which we mixed âBlue in Greenâ with the sounds of typing and working in order to mirror how many people often listen to soft classical music whilst studying and also, provide a chill atmosphere for the users before the contrast of the louder sounds from the bottles.
Overall
If we were to do this again or improve it, we could perhaps include more javascript animation to enhance user experience. Moreover, I would have also liked to include more of our own self-recorded audio and rely less on youtube; however, due to our bottles being in very different places around the world, this would be hard to do so.
Despite all this, Iâm really happy with the way our project turned out. I think it may have even turned out better than what I imagined it to just because we included a lot of personal and intricate details to our project. As such, we hope we were able to successfully communicate not only what these different places sound like but also, the different culture and traditions that exceed the abilities of audio.