Assn. #1b – What did you learn about sound design?

With the absence of a visual medium, sound takes on a completely different form. The same is true when combining together a collection of sounds into an abstract soundscape. The mood and tone of a soundscape can be drastically altered with just a few tweaks here and there. As a group, our first task was to identify ourselves with all the sounds in our library so that we could begin to piece together the concept of our soundscape. We process was simple, build our soundscape through trial and error, adding what we thought gave our concept life while – removing what didn’t seem to mesh with our idea. It was fascinating to hear the nuances of how each sound interlocked with another. Since we settled on the idea of marriage for our concept we wanted to include Parkers conversation with his mother since their whole conversation was about his mother and father’s anniversary. We wanted the listener to feel like they were engaged in the conversation so we added some muffled voices to other end of the phone call as well as adding in a car engine starting to create an environment around him. Since we were allowed to get abstract with the soundscape we decided to alter several of the sounds and juxtapose them together to create a sense of ambiguity. Overall the soundscape took a life of its own and it was incredibly interesting to have everyone in the class listen to it and describe what they envisioned.