Track

Space Diagram

Space Inspiration

This piece is inspired by an indoor swimming pool that I used to visit frequently in Taiwan. The swimming pool is located inside a fitness center called World Gym and the gym is located inside a shopping mall. What is interesting about most World Gym fitness centers in Taiwan is that visually they look more like nightclubs than spaces for exercising. As exciting as the gym wants the space to seem, the contrast between the lack of members and the loud music and complex interior design really makes the space seem even more empty and lifeless. In this piece, the narrator enters the changing room from the gym, enters the swimming pool from the changing room, and leaves the same way.

Working Process

All the sounds in my soundtrack were completely recorded inside my dormitory bathroom and kitchen or in the building’s common area. This project did require me to experiment a lot with water and learn about how different interactions with it can create different effects. Some of the things I did include filling up the bathtub and using cooking pot to create water kicking effect, filling up frying pan and slapping my palms against it to create wet stepping sound, and using water boiler to create some of the underwater sound. For this project, I had a clear objective in my head and attempted to recreate each element one by one by using anything I can find inside my dorm. The process was difficult and required a lot of imagination and manipulation of sounds. The most difficult and heavily edited segments of my sound track would be when my character goes into the water and comes back out again, because with the Zoom recorder I could not actually record sounds underwater. For this segment, I ended up using a lot of pitch bending, reverb, decay, and auto filter tools.

Compositional Strategy

Overall, my process was primarily devoted to making my work logical and reasonable both sequentially and spatially. In terms of strategy, I wanted to introduce the space in a first-person point of view by having my character passing through all these spaces and letting the functions of the space speak for itself. The storyline is that my character enters the changing room from the gym. He walks across the changing/showering area and enters the swimming pool. He jumps into the pool, swims for a lap, and gets up from the other side. He walks across the swimming pool and passes through the changing area again before he leaves. At the end, I just want this piece to be as reasonable and easily understandable as possible for others who are trying to imagine the space.

My Assessment

The part that makes me the most proud of by putting together this project would be how I was able to manipulate some of the sounds into becoming something completely different. Even though the continuous process of recording, replaying, and rerecording frustrated me a little, I really enjoyed the editing part of this project. Another aspect of this project that I really took into consideration and am generally proud of would be the spatial relationship between how sounds echo and the scale of the space. In the shower for example, there was not a lot of reverberation. However, as soon as the character enters the swimming pool area, the wetness of reverberation and decay increases drastically. Besides how sounds bounce back differently due to the scale of space, I also thought it would be interesting to explore how sounds bounce back differently underwater, which is a part of the reason why I picked a gym swimming pool for my project. Some of the sound qualities that only occurs underwater such as very low frequencies and the ping pong delay effects are all things that I’ve tried and am happy that I’ve included.

For this project, I feel like if I have included more details, the space might be even more convincing and characterized. One thing I regret I did not focus on would be the material qualities of the space. I think if somehow I can make the changing room sound more wooden and the swimming pool sound more metallic, that will help depict the space a lot better. Another detail related improvement I can make would be other people’s actions and movement inside the space. Some examples would be letting the person taking shower to make more sounds that indicate a person is showering, or letting some people in the background of the swimming pool move across or swim next to the character. I also feel like other small details such as changing room locker opening and closing or lifeguard blowing whistle are all great examples of how I can improve and characterize this space by a lot.