For this project, I created a soundscape that described the life of a blind girl to the audience. I drew three maps of the rooms in her house by myself. The three maps showed to the audience is actually three buttons. Therefore, the audience can choose which space they would like to explore first on their own. After the audience clicks the button and go into that specific space, they will be shown a bigger map so that they will feel like they are really in that room. And in each room, I inserted at least 3 sound clips on different objects for the audience to trigger by themselves. In the following, I would like to explain the sound that I inserted, my central idea, and the future development that I can have based on the suggestions given by my classmates and professors.
In the bedroom, I have made four sound clips in total. The sound of getting up, in which I combined the sound of an alarm clock, the sound of the dog waking the girl up, the sound of the girl getting up and her footsteps. The sound of a bear, I combined my own sound in an original song, implying that the girl is full of love and likes talking to her bear. The sound of the dog barking and chewing food. The sound of taking out the headphone, and listen to music from her headphone.
In the kitchen, there are three sound clips. The sound of boiling water, drinking water and taking pills. Also, in this sound clip, I recorded one sound of the bottle cap’s falling down, indicating that there are some difficulties in her life (1). The sound of pulling out a chair. The sound of her playing the drum.
In the living room, there are three distinctive sound clips. The sound of a radio which she used to listen to the news. The sound of going out and shutting the door. The sound of her playing the piano (2).
For the interaction part, I chose a very easy way, mouse click only. But I used jQuery to add a bunch of “fade in” & “fade out” effects to the elements, and also fancy transitions when the mouse has hovered on the buttons. I also add “fade in” & “fade out” effects on the audio that I inserted, especially on the transition between the sound clips and the background music.
The central idea that I try to deliver is that the physically disabled people do have difficulties in their daily life, but they actually have much less difference than we thought. There are over 1.3 billion people suffering from visual impairment all over the world, namely, one-fifth of people in the world. They actually are capable of many more jobs than we thought, however, on most companies’ recruitment requirements, there will still be a statement: “not for physically disabled”, and I want to use this project to arouse people’s awareness about this phenomenon.
For future development, I think I can focus more on enriching the audience’s hearing experience. Also, for the last ending sound clip, I can add a conditional function in JavaScript to make the button only appear after the audience view all three rooms instead of being there all the time.
http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~tz1422/ACharmingGirl-cr_ttina/
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