The final video has been uploaded on youtube. Welcome to watch online!
I proposed to simplify the visual part and my group decided to do something different to what we did last time. For this exhibition task, the focus would be on the sounds and more efforts would been put on the sound part rather than the visual section. Got the inspiration from a youtube channel called “Music for your soul”. However, the one that had been produced was not a pure piece of music. The theme was illusion and we chose to include the concepts of soundscape, voice and spatiality in our project. What had been created for the sound section was a mixing of soundscape, background music and a voice over of a poem read in mandarin.
The sounds in the soundscape that had been created could be basically divided into two kinds of sounds. One kind of sounds was ambient sounds in the daily life and we wanted to keep them real and could be recognised by the audiences easily. The other kind of sounds was more abstract and lots of sound effects were added to ensure they were “illusionary”. Besides, I produced the background music for the project, writing down the musical score and recording myself playing the piano. What had been applied to the piano piece were echo, fades and lots of cuttings. The most effects being added to the soundscape were reverb and echo. Also, delay, reverb, EQ and noise reduction were applied to the voice over in order to make the voices more natural but clear. The voice over in this project joined the voices of Cindy’s, Jenna’s and mine together. To make the sound more stunned, I adjusted the volumes of the voice over little by little and at the end, the volumes changed almost at every second. Because I am a person who pay lots of attentions to details so that most of the adjustments were basically handled by me. I applied time shift to the one of Jenna’s as she spoke a bit faster than the music. Fades in and out were massively used throughout the editing process.
Rorem points out that the larger public is passive. What people normally do when hearing sounds or music compositions, they would prefer to listen to which make them feel relaxed, comfortable or attracted. In this case, the work we created was the one which enable people to relaxed. The music was soft and slow, there was a soundscape of the city scene being set and we create a leading voice in this work to guide people’s attention. According to Schafer(2011), there are too many different sounds in the modern world. The soundscapes are very noisy. Research has shown that “Urban soundscape and acoustic comfort, although not visually perceivable, is an important component of the overall physical comfort”(Kang & Zhang, 2010). People would prefer natural sounds compared with industrial sounds. So that how to make our soundscape be appealing to the audiences was important. Scherer(1995) states that emotions in human voice can affect the listeners. The way our group tried to achieve the emotional speaking was to read the poem with the music playing at the same time in our headphones. During the recording time along Yarra river, we tried our best to capture the flashing sounds as many as we could and make the best use of them.
For the visual part, there were two photos included when showing on the screen. We did a split screen for the two photos. Colour correction which includes exposure, white, black, sharpen, colour balance etc. had been added to the photos. I photoshopped the one which there was a car. Some filters were added too. Cindy finished the subtitle part with the help of Jenna and I. There were some animations being used in our video which were the rain in the city and the starry night. We tried to include a sound wave but we were afraid that the video might be too messy. Besides, it was hard for us to create a sound wave without learning how to do that. We tried to follow the youtube tutorials of making sound waves however they were hard and we could not find the way to apply it to our video.
During the exhibition, there was a screen being offered and we asked for two headphones. We asked for a screen as we got a simple video to show however we were looking forward to use the usb rather than the computer. It turned out that people were watching the computer instead of watching the big screen. We moved the position of the poster during the exhibition. It was firstly sticked on the table however only few people noticed that. Then we hang up the poster which worked better this time. We were satisfied with what we did from the last couple of weeks and got all the positive feedbacks from audiences. There were people who listened to the work twice and being touched which was just what we expected to see! I really learnt a lot from the exhibition.
Reference
Rorem, N. (1963). LISTENING AND HEARING. Music Journal, 21(9), 28. Viewed on September 26.2018
Scherer, K. (1995). Expression of emotion in voice and music. Journal of Voice, 9(3), 235-248.
Schafer, R. (2011). The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Rochester, Vt.: Destiny Books.
Kang, & Zhang. (2010). Semantic differential analysis of the soundscape in urban open public spaces. Building and Environment, 45(1), 150-157.
link to google drive:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1egGi_RvqVGYKjtfm596pWwgyJ6f6rfBA