Assignment 1

 

Reflection

 

During class time, we record 27 sonic materials with zoomH4n recorder. From these sounds, I chose the sound of chirping, piano, footstep, cafeteria, train and wind because I want to make a quiet music piece. This idea is inspired by ‘one pig’ in the workshop and I think these sounds like chirping and piano can satisfice the requirement of slow rhythm.

 

However, in the process of editing I changed the music piece to a 2-minute short scene. It opens with a girl standing alone in the forest, hearing bird’s chirping. After that, we go deep into her mind and see her memories. There are two memories in total, they are divided by the ‘typing’ sound. She firstly thinks of the cafeteria where they always met together and then the moment when her best friend jumped and left forever. The collage ends up with the same scene at the beginning, where her recalls ends and come back to the reality.

 

The whole collage can be viewed as two part: internal sound and external diegetic sound. The chirping, footstep, wind is external sound. The train, music in the cafeteria and the typing sound are internal sounds that portrays her memories. Typing represents that she is remembering the dates, when the events happened.  On top of that, the piano describes her actual emotion. When she saw her friend left, she feels a bit sad, miss her. It’s a complex emotion. Overall, I think editing is a powerful tool. It allows me to incorporate different sounds together, edit it in my own way and creates an imaginary world that only exist in my mind.

 

However, I also meet some problem when editing with adobe audition. I said I trying to make a music piece initially. I experiment a little bit, want to make up a beat with footstep and piano but I found my present technical skill doesn’t allow me to do that and that’s why I change my mind later. Three typing sounds are from this experiment. They are made with piano, footstep and chirping. Although, there are difficulties, I also tried a few new things. I change the stereo balance of chirping sound, make the sounds come from different direction so that it can be more natural. I add echo effect on the piano to make it sounds nicer. I also use noise reduction to reduce the extra noise in wind sample so the wind will sound more comfortable.

 

Overall, I think this is a great experience for me to explore more about the software and myself, know better about my lack and study on it. Get improvements in the future!

 

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/12YbaLgYXhjspXWSlcXp5Iy5wfkX-oBGM?usp=sharing

THANK YOU!

Initial thoughts

Assignment 1 (initial thoughts)

Initially, I want try to make a music piece with these 5 samples. I want it to have slow rhythm, to sound nice and be interesting. According to this idea, I want to record sound of water, chirp, wind because they’re all come from nature, which is relaxing. Maybe add some footsteps to make up a beat and use chirp and wind to make up a rhythum, just like the ‘One Pig’ we heard in our first workshop, making up a really good music with pig.

I just got this really big idea and I want to try to make a music piece because I never make one before.

Wenyan Zhang