Sound Project

About two weeks ago, I completed my Soundscape project with my partner, where we were challenged to imagine and produce a scene only through sound. This was another step in learning the elements of how to tell a story and learning how sound effects and other auditory techniques are essential. 

My partner S and I put our brains together to come up with a simple story that involved lots of opportunities for sound and decided on recreating a pool party. We created our Soundscape Outline which helped us not only detail every sound we aimed to use or create through Foley, but also helped us distribute what part each one of us was responsible for. S was responsible for the sounds highlighted in pink, while I was responsible for those highlighted in purple.

Despite only four Foley sounds being required for the rubric's sake of the project, I found myself foleying other sounds simply because it was more effective and productive than scouring the internet for a sound I could create myself. For example, rather than waste time looking for a super-specific soda can clink I had in mind for the end of the soundscape scene, I decided to create the sound myself, as I only needed one second of sound and it wasn't difficult to achieve. My partner S thought the same, which is why we opted for recording the sounds of a seatbelt unbuckling or a car door shutting ourselves. By using foley, we gained much more control over the sound and could accurately depict our creative choices made in pre-production. To see what other sounds we created with foley, click here

Editing was super tricky, but very rewarding because I believe the soundscape came out sounding pretty realistic for the majority of it. Later when I received critiques on our project, some students did not fundamentally understand the setting, but the students that did, they complimented the realism through the use of background sound and creating sound dimension (for example, as the character walks closer to the party, the music gradually fades in). 

In all my editing experience, I have never used more editing tracks than I did in this project, especially not audio tracks (the max before was probably 3). It was really fun getting to try out, but my biggest pain was the levels. Every time I wanted to adjust the levels of one track to be louder, I had to lower all the layers without muting them completely, but find the balance where all my sounds are clearly heard but the overall audio isn't peaking (bless Premiere Pro for the Hard Limiter effect). That's why the music was the biggest challenge, because, for the majority of my editing, it was either super loud or super quiet. By controlling the gain even hiding some cuts with constant power and lowering the gain at certain points, I was able to make it work. 

Personally, I was quite satisfied with the end result of my project, though, of course, it was disheartening to read critiques where the student completely misinterpreted the scene because the rest of their critiques did not align with the same intentions I had when creating the soundscape. However, I did find some success as multiple students absolutely nailed the interpretation, and their nitpicks I did reflectively agree with (like how the timing of the slurps at the end were maybe too quickly timed and could be paced a little slower to create more realism). Ultimately, this project was a really great learning experience and I enjoyed such experimentation with sound elements that now I can use in future productions. 

Here is the link to my final soundscape.