Audio Project Link: http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~sls741/audio_project/
Description
For our audio project, we wanted to explore the differences amongst people, so we decided it would be cool to ask a group of people the same question and see how their answers differed. We thought this would be a cool type of social question given that there are so many people from different countries and backgrounds that go to our school. We ended up recording 12 different people and asking them the question “What does Home sound like to you?”. It was interesting because when we asked people to respond to our question we didn’t really give them any other information so a couple of people actually tried to explain to us what the actual word “home” sounded like to them. Overall a lot of the responses about what reminded people of home were pretty similar, a couple of people even had specific songs which they associated with home. We then decided to create a soundscape of the sounds which the interviewees described as reminding them of home, in order to recreate the sound of what they’re home sounds like. You can hear the sounds playing in the background as they describe their homes.
Execution
For this project, we used the TASCAM recorders along with the shotguns to record peoples responses. This was probably the easiest part of our project as we just had to go around asking people to answer our question, we mostly stayed within the cafe and cafeteria when asking people. We then edited the recordings using audacity to try and reduce the background noise as we recorded these in pretty loud spaces. We also edited the length of the recordings as some people took a long time to answer the question and there was a lot of blank noise, we also used the amplify feature on audacity to make some of their voices louder as some of the recordings were too quiet. Once we edited their voices we collected the sounds of the things they described as hearing in their homes, such as dogs barking or the sound of people making things in the kitchen, through the website freesounds.org that has a whole bunch of free sounds that are licensed through the creative commons. This was really helpful as collecting some of these sounds in real life would’ve been difficult, such as the sound of the ocean. Once edited and the soundscape created in the background we then imputed them into the website we created for this project. We then used some of the simple javascript code we have learned to create a button that would then play the playlist of the audios of the responses. We then also made a stop button and a pause button to add to the audios, the stop button stopping the current response and playing the next one when started again or the pause button which pauses the track and would commence at the same spot once started again. We then thought to add some interactivity that it would be cool to have a next page where it would create a collage of words of the all the things that were mentioned that remind people of their homes.
Conclusion
Overall I really enjoyed making this project, it was really interesting to hear the responses from the different people and then be able to create the soundscape and actually hear and get an idea of what their home actually sounds like. Some problems we encountered was that at first, we decided to just use our iPhones to record because since we were just recording voices we thought it would be okay, however, we soon realized that the iPhones recorded way too much of the background noise as well. That was a little bit of a hiccup as we had to go out and record more audios using the TASCAM. Once we used the TASCAM, however, although better and having crisper sounding audio, the background noise was still pretty noticeable. To reduce this we then used the noise reduction feature on audacity but this only worked to a certain extent as the sound would become distorted if we used this effect too much. I think next time it would be better to ask the people we are interviewing to come to a quiet room where the background noise is minimal. Besides this small problem, everything else ran very smoothly and I am very proud of the way our project turned out. I think that if you were to close your eyes and listen to the audios you can pretty much picture yourself there as the background sounds really create a powerful image in your head.