Week 7: Audio Project – Allie Dunnaville

Link: http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~op531/audio-coding2/familymart.html

For this audio project, my partner and I decided we wanted the focus of our project to be on creating ASMR sounds. ASMR stands for an autonomous sensory meridian response. In translation, this basically means the relaxing, stimulating feeling some people get down their spines, heads, and rest of their body from listening to gentle sounds.

It wasn’t until we received feedback during our project proposal to choose one category of sounds. After discussing ideas with my partner, we decided to focus on FamilyMart foods. I touched on this during my partner and I’s in-class presentation, but we agreed on what foods/drinks we wanted to use based on what we thought would make a diverse array sound effects for the user. We did not wish just to choose chips or only drinks because we did not believe these sounds would be unique enough. But, at the same time after doing some research (https://asmruniversity.com/art-of-asmr-tips-for-artists/), I found that often ASMR triggers involve people’s favorite foods or comfort foods such as potato chips, so this is another factor I considered when choosing foods in FamilyMart.

One of the leading roles I had in this project was creating and editing the audio. To generate the ASMR sounds I used three items. My MacBook Pro, Beats headphones, and a Yeti Microphone. I recorded the sounds using QuickTime Player which was previously installed in my laptop. I set the Yeti audio recording setting to bidirectional, which intakes sound from the front and back of the microphone. I chose this setting because after testing all the other functions, this was the clearest of them all. I also did some background research (https://asmruniversity.com/art-of-asmr-tips-for-artists/) and found that when recording ASMR and individual should be the opposite of angry when speaking or even eating food—remember the purpose of ASMR is to transmit a sense of relaxation. So, while recording sounds even though I wasn’t talking, while I was chewing, I attempted to make all my sounds smooth and flowing. One of the last tips I focused on while creating the ASMR sounds was my distance from the microphone. I learned that to pick-up better-quality sound, I must basically be touching the mic with my lips, if not the sound is not as clear. Sometimes I would have to restart a recording because I got too close to the microphone and accidentally hit it which created a thumping sound. As I went on to produce more sounds, the thumping happened less, and I could get through recording the audio quicker. In terms of editing the audio, I barely needed to touch the raw version of it. I used Finalcut Pro to adjust some of the levels of the, so the spikes were not overbearing, but other than that not much was done to the clips.

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Another role I had in the creation of our project was designing the background for inside the store. I created the shelves from scratch using shapes such as triangles, squares, and lines in Keynote. The reason for having to develop this by myself was because surprisingly it was tough to find images of empty shelves on Google big enough for what we were looking for. I felt that designing the shelf was quite simple and straight forward, but the biggest issue we ran into was actually formatting the shelving correctly to make sure all of the food items fit properly and looked aesthetically pleasing. After spending a day or two sending the code back and forth with my partner cutting, cropping, and adjusting the size of the image we were finally able to make everything work properly!

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Lastly, after my partner finalized the code, I was able to work on the design of both pages adjusting font color, size, style, etc. I also found and implemented some cute images of shopping carts to add to the buttons taking the user from the homepage and inside the store itself.

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In general, my partner and I reached all of the goals we set for our project. I think if we had more time to continue working on this project in the future we could add more sound clips and maybe even look at what types of different foods convenience stores (such as 7/11) around the world have in them and create sounds based on those foods and stores and then compare and contrast the similarities. I had a great time working with my partner on this project and overall learned a lot and had a lot of fun!