Reece Smith- Reflection

“Scarescape”

When we began thinking of ideas for the soundscape, as a group, we wanted to do something different, something which wouldn’t be the first thing people thought of. We played around with a lot of concepts but felt that the horror one would be a definite idea to explore. Personally, I am very interested in sound design for games and films. I find it amazing how someone can create a piece of music that provokes such an emotional reaction is the listener, such as to scare them. We quickly developed a story idea of how our soundscape would play out.

We quickly developed a story idea of how our soundscape would play out. A kidnapping of a man, taken into a room where men would walk around him preparing to torture him only then to be distracted and leave whilst the man is left alone. I feel as though the final product and the soundscape itself fit the intended criteria fairly well, we had to make a few adjustments along the way, particularly in terms of timings as our sounds could have easily filled 5 minutes, so shortening it down to the required 2 minutes was definitely a difficult task. This meant that we weren’t able to use a lot of the pieces of audio we had recorded, which was disappointing as it was a lot of time, and effort to collect them.

However, the recording stage still had it’s fair share of challenges. A lot of the sounds we intended to obtain were produced from rather quiet sources, for example, a tap dripping. This meant that when levelling them up with the other sounds we had recorded, the background noises were just too high. We tried experimenting with different techniques to get around this, using different microphones, we experimented with boundary microphones, contact microphones, different types of condenser microphones, particularly the Rode-USB as it was easy to transport however we settled that most recordings were done with the Zoom H4n Recorder, due to it’s obvious advantages of transportation and recording in stereo, which in itself wasn’t too bad for the perspective recordings.

When it came to editing the audio, we had a considerable amount of sounds which we couldn’t use. We only used 27 out of the 55 audio files we gained for the final piece. The editing stage was the most interesting and the stage in which most of the techniques were learnt. Organisation was an important factor here, having 27 different audio tracks to deal with was definitely not easy, and it significantly improved my efficiency working with ProTools.  We made sure to add effects which were covered in the workshop sessions and then experiment with ones of our own. EQ was a predominantly used insert for a lot of the audio files to boost or cut out certain frequencies. Reverb was used a lot less than we thought would be necessary, we wanted the sounds to feel as though they were confined, close to the listener rather than out in a large open space.

Furthermore, we found that experimenting with elastic audio was a really helpful tool to edit the sounds in a way which caused them to feel ‘unnatural’ or ‘creepy’ and we also experimented with using sounds from other sources to fit the feel of a different sound, for example, the creaky door being used as a siren, adding to the unnatural feel of the overall piece.

To conclude, I feel as though the piece worked generally well. It fulfilled it’s intended purpose as creating a feel as though people are walking around you and so the listener can interpret the perspective of the sounds. I enjoyed the process, personally, and I feel as though it really developed my knowledge of recording and editing sounds.