link: http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~lag614/audio%20project/index.html
Our project tells the story of a little girl sneaking into her brother’s room where there’s a record shelf and on the shelf, she found some records of sounds of different places in Shanghai. The story of this little girl is inspired by Laila whose brother also has a shelf like this.
Laila made the HTML page and the sound of People’s Park. I collected and edited the sound of street food and the sound of The Bund.
For both of the mixings of sound, I used songs of Jimmy King as background music. Jimmy King was one of the top Jazz bands in Shanghai during the 1930s and it’s songs give me a mental image of the prosperity of the old Shanghai.
In the beginning of the street food sound, I used a sentence of Shanghainese which means “Did you have dinner?”. Then I mixed the sound of customers ordering food at the dumpling stand, BBQ and fried noodles together. It was raining when I went out recording these sounds, so the noise was a little loud. And it’s really hard to record very detailed sounds, since I didn’t want to interrupt others’ business. So after reduction of noise, I chose the clearest part and amplified it until it was loud enough to be heard.
The most difficult part of editing the sound of The Bund is organizing those elements together. I recorded a lot of sounds at The Bund and I didn’t know how to put them together to make them sound complete and harmonious. At first, I just put the sounds that I like together, and then I made adjustments according to my feelings. I really like the sound I recorded in the Peace Hotel at the very end of the mixing, which was Jazz music played in the hotel café. However, there were many people talking in the background and it’s hard to separate the music from the human voice. I tried my best to reduce the noise and amplify the sound of the music, but it still sounds a little bit weak.
