Assignment 01: Auditory Imaging

Week 5

Assignment 01 Briefing

We need to choose a category from below to create a story and ambience by using sound design. 

Category:

1. Wildlife + Background

2. Everyday Home Life + Background

3. Cities + Transport + Exterior Atmosphere

4. Industry and Electronic sounds + Background

5. Weather + Background

6. Market + Rural atmosphere + Background

After we select a category, we proceed to create a story with first person-perspective. We need to figure out what kind of sound we need to use in these scenarios and find it online. Then, we need to do layering, editing and combine these sounds to create the ambience we want. The final product should be able to tell the whole story by just using sound. People should understand our story by just listen to the audio. 

Process

I choose the cities + transport + exterior atmosphere. I create a story about an office worker, getting tired by the office environment and take a short break at outside of the building. 

Story:

List of sounds:

1. In Office

- air-con sound

- people talking

- phone blarring

- printer scanning

- keyboard typing

- moving chair

- main character walking sound

2. Leaving the office

- open normal office door

- main character walking sound

- noises from traffice outside

- open the revolving door

3. Streetwalk

- car sound

- main character walking sound

- people walking sound

- people talking

- wind

- car honking

- car engine sound

- traffic light beeping

- car speeding

- construction sound

- people running

- ambulance sound

- cycling bell ringing

- old man grunt

Product:

Google Drive Link:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1eaBZo7AvvSRQ8jtdWJb0OpDBOLLKinGP?usp=sharing

Adobe Audition Whole Session

wav.

mp3

Firstly, I find and collect as much audio clips as I needed. Then, I mostly adjust the volume and pan of the audio clips. I also cut the audio clips to make sure it only includes the audio I want and also I equalizer to some of them to adjust the sound of the audio clips to suits the environment better. I mix and match a lot of audio clips to produce this product as my story is mostly in noisy places, this causes me to need to add a lot of different sound. But at my first attempt, I added too much sounds and the volume is too loud which makes my project loses its focus. Thus, I re-adjust the volume and take out the unnecessary sounds to make the audio clearer and create a much stronger focal point. 

Reflection

I learned a lot on this assignment as I am able to create a whole new environment based on my own story and creativity. Not only I learn about storytelling but I also learned about creating an ambience based on sound only without any dialogue. This is very useful for my future projects such as game development which I need to learn to create an environment with sound effects. I hope that this lesson can help me to polish my sound design skills and I can do better sound design in future.