Sonic design_Project 2

Name: TANG YUYING

Student ID: 0370676

Programmed: Interactive special design

Module name: Interactive Design (202504-LLecture)

Project 2

In this blog post, we will tell a two-minute story through sound; although there is no dialogue, we will use sound to convey the environment and the protagonist's experiences to the audience. In this assignment, the main editing software we use is Au, and other sounds are from sound material websites.

Story:

（Green-Background Atmosphere; Yellow- Action Sounds）

Background Atmosphere：

-Indoor

• Clock ticking (tick-tock)

-Outside window

•  Light wind

-Rainfall

•  Sudden heavy rain
• Continuous rain on umbrella (Rain hitting umbrella)

-Rainy street

• car pass with splash

-Inside convenience store

• store entrance bell / ding-ling
• Soft background music
• Low hum of the air conditioner
• scanner beeped "beep"
• coins clinked into the tray with a soft jingle

-On the way home

• Bell rang once more.
• Rainfall Stroger
• Plastic bag rustled with each step

Action Sounds：

-Opening / closing door

- Searching bag for umbrella (Zipper opening)

-Opening umbrella

-Walking (Footsteps on wet pavement, Hurried footstep)

-Shoes squeaked slightly against the tiled floor

-picked up a bag of snacks—the plastic crinkled softly in my hand

-opened the fridge and grabbed a drink (Refrigerator door open / click)

-Leaving convenience store (Doorbell + returning rain ambience)

-Drinking (Drinking sound)

- Plastic bag crinkle 

-Sighing  

In this project, I tended to focus on creating the atmosphere of traveling on a rainy day. So for the background sounds, I used a lot of rain and wind effects.

Additionally, I added the sound of cars passing by the protagonist while he is walking along the street. The sound effects I downloaded originally had a lot of noise, which made it hard to hear the finer details. Therefore, I adjusted them using the Parametric Equalizer and applied a High Pass Filter to remove the low-frequency noise.

Finally, I made adjustments to two sound elements: the background music and the sound of opening the fridge to take a can of cola.

First, the original background music was very loud and lacked dynamics, so I lowered its volume. Then, in the Mixer, I reduced the dB level to around -3 to -6 dB. This way, the background music doesn’t sound overpowering.

As for the fridge sound effect, the original downloaded audio was very quiet, and if you didn’t listen carefully, it was easy to miss the sound of the fridge door closing. So, I increased the overall volume and also raised the dB level in the Mixer. Now, the sound is much clearer and more noticeable.

（The values of dB were respectively lowered and raised）

（Adjust the volume of the material to make the sound have undulations）

Feedback:

Among the feedback provided by the teacher, the major issue was related to the background music. Since the background music had an impact on other sounds, the teacher's suggestion was to remove the background music or to lower the volume of the background music and integrate it more seamlessly into the background. Based on the teacher's advice, I chose to remove the background music and add other action music to enrich the overall feeling of the story, so that the sound would not be empty.

Web link：

The website I use to download audio materials

爱给网

Pixabay