The start of our editing work

We have finished the recording stage and are ready to move onto editing.

 

As we have placed a great deal of emphasis on editing techniques for our soundscape to get the dark and unnatural sounds which will provoke the desired reactions from the listeners, we felt that the editing and mixing stages should be given at least as much focus as the recording stage itself. We created a rough script based on our story and split the editing into 3 sections (one section per member) in order to get a rough template of the soundscape. We then put these 3 sections together, ensuring that they flowed together sensibly and maintained the ‘horror’ feel throughout.

Since we attempted to focus on binaural recordings, we settled for panning the recorded audio to get a similar effect, for example, we used pan to make the footsteps seem as though they went from the front of the room to the side where he then turned a tap off.

For sounds we had recorded such as the sharpening of a knife, we used a small amount of Equalization, we used a peak filter to boost the higher frequencies to cause a sort of, harsh tone as the blade got closer the source. We also used a noise gate for the footsteps as the background level of the footsteps was a lot higher than the quiet audio tracks before that and so the transition was almost impossible without the gate.

We wanted to leave most of the locational sounds as untouched as possible to cause the soundscape to feel as realistic as possible whilst also containing sounds which were unnatural to that environment to get the contrast to suggest the eerie atmosphere.

 

Furthermore, we overestimated the number of recordings we would need for our soundscape, the script of our soundscape focused on 5-second blocks however when we put all the building blocks together, it lasted a lot longer than that, ranging on 4 minutes. Therefore we had to rethink the story slightly to cope with only being able to use 2 minutes of it. We had obtained 55 different recordings to use and it is possible that we will only use 20 or so in the final product yet it was very worthwhile to work with so many different recordings.