Project Reflection
The memory that I have chosen for the assignment is when I was a kid hearing my dad cooking for me after coming back from school. This cooking routine was a large part of my youth memory because when I was younger, I’ve always never thought about how much effort and to work it is to cook different dishes every day, especially when cooking Chinese-style dishes. For the sound file that I submitted, I focused on the actual sounds of the memory in order to straightforwardly convey what’s happening to the audience. I planned for my soundscape to show solitude, growth, and adulthood responsibility. However, for the resubmission, I plan to focus more on the feeling aspect of my father, showing the rushing movements and his mood being in a hurry.
When collecting sounds for this project, I experimented with creating different sounds that I hear when people cook, including footsteps, ventilation, chopping, slicing, cutting, water dripping, putting plates on the table, and finally opening the door to wait for me to come back from school. When recreating these sounds, brings me back to my childhood when my family would cook for me every day, unlike now in college where I learned how to cook for ourselves. For most of the sounds, I placed the Tascam recorder at a fixed spot close to where I created the sounds. Overall, the only problem I encountered was the sounds being too light the first time I recorded them, I then turned up the volume on the side of the recorder and retried recording, but it was too loud. So I had to readjust to find a fitting volume level for my sounds when editing them in Audition.
As for my editing process, I wasn’t sure what effects exactly I should add to convey a mundane and mature feeling. As previously mentioned, I adjusted the DB level for my sound clips because some were extra loud while some were very light sounds. I amplified them a bit and I also played around with panning and only heard some sounds on the left and some sounds on the right to create a more realistic kitchen environment. I also changed some sounds’ volumes to gradually increase but it didn’t show up well in the final soundscape clip. Some learnings I have after editing on Audition would be to explore combining the sounds instead of putting most sounds in sequence, with one after another.
If I had more time, I would improve my project’s sounds to be more surprising to the audience and less obvious. By this I mean to add more surprises and keep the audience engaged because my clip was edited to be in a very sequential manner and the audience could guess what the next sound would be. This doesn’t very much convey a feeling to the audience. On the presentation day, I received feedback as the sound was too realistic and there wasn’t much anticipation of wanting to know what was happening from the sound clip. I agree with this comment and I will note this when I re-edit the sounds as I plan to play around with merging them and as well as adding repetitions of sounds to make it more interesting to the audience.
My work in Adobe Audition:
