Audio Project – A Map of Shanghai Sounds (Madi & Clover)
Link: http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~mne234/AudioProject/(please open on chrome not safari)
For our audio project, we decided to do a map that takes you through different sounds in Shanghai. The sounds we chose to record and edit were from our school’s cafe, a KTV bar, a park, and the music from the ladies who dance to traditional Chinese music (near the Century Ave subway). Through this experience, we hope the user can get a sense of the city and further get to know it. We discuss what the school and places mean to us, so that the user gets an idea of how much Shanghai is so important to our lives.
Process
The first thing we did was create the HTML page so that we had a base to work off from. Then we recorded the audios and collected them into one folder. This kept us organized so that we could put everything together as one. For the park, I remixed 3 different sounds. I recorded the sound of a water fall, some birds, and the street outside to combine it all into this park audio. The KTV bar I did in a similar way and just blended and edited the audio from a KTV bar near our dorms. The other sounds were recorded to their original sound without adding anything. When you first open the home page, music immediately starts playing. I edited this by finding some Chill Hop music and an audio of a rainy city background. I mixed these two together for the background music of the page. The photos used were also taken by us.
Through buttons, you can navigate to different places to hear the sounds. We used ‘let’ to define them, then ‘addEventListener’ to give an action to these buttons. For the audios, we made 3 buttons to either play, pause, or return home. The specific audio will play once you click on it. We also added two introduction audios to the beginning that will play if you click on the button. These are voice recorded by Clover, and we had another NYU student (Jamie) to give an introduction audio as well.
Lots of coding was needed for all the buttons and linking them to the correct audios, so this was a bit confusing and difficult to navigate through. Although, once I was able to fully understand how the ‘let’ functions worked, I was able to replicate and rename everything so that it could work properly.
Post Mortem
Overall, I think the project definitely met our goals. As we progressed through it, more and more ideas came to us so that we could further expand from our original idea. I was very happy with the look and style of it, as I wanted it to look interesting and aesthetically pleasing. I think we accomplished this. If we had more time, I would’ve wanted to record a lot more places all throughout Shanghai so that we could have an extensive map (also maybe a more interactive one) of sounds for people to hear the city through. This would include finding more significant popular locations in Shanghai and adding them to a more extensive map.