Lina Lee

https://soundcloud.com/leelina44/nightmare-before-wakeup

Nightmare Before Wakeup

When we first got the assignment I knew immediately that I wanted to do something that had to do with dreams. I started researching dreams and dream analysis. I read about Freudian vs Jungian analysis, I didn’t delve into the neo-freudian or the neo-jungian for simplicity’s sake. I found out about dream analysis, where the analyst (a step up from a therapist) would listen to the patient’s dream and let the patient work out what the dream was about. In away, they used dreams as a way to delve into the patient’s subconscious. I learned about the four stages of REM sleep; sleep onset, light sleep and stage deep sleep and deeper sleep.

Originally I wanted my audio to be about waking up from a dream. But I realized that the dream needed to be specific so I choose the audio to be about waking up from a nightmare.

I wanted the structure of the video to be; deep sleep to waking up to consciousness. To achieve that I used recordings of my step dad half asleep. I had about 12 or so voice recordings of my step dad half conscious, so I knew I had some editing to do. I listened to the 12 or so tracks I have of his voice and edited out parts that were cleaner and parts where there were prolonged talking. This condensed about 5 hours of recording to about 30 bite sized video bits. I acquired the alarm tone and the ‘heavy breathing’ from online. I spent about a week walking around and recording whatever seemed relevant to the project from that I acquired the room ton and the bed crumpling noise. For the room tone, I used a recording of a siren from my room. FOr the bed crumpling noise, I left the recorder on a couple of times while I was making the bed.

Editing was interesting. I realized that lynda has the answers, but I had to weed through a massive amount of information in order to get to a simple answer. So I used a combination of lynda and adobe forms. Mostly I used the speed tool to play with the speed and tone of the sounds. I used Channel Volume to make transitions smoother and the volumes reasonably level where it was suppose to be. I used the razor tool to make cuts where I wanted to the second, this by far was the most useful tool I learned. For example, I had gotten the ‘heavy breathing’ clip from online, I wanted to make it longer so I cut and pasted a part of the ‘heavy breathing’ to the full heavy breathing audio to make it longer and more believable. I used pan during the dream sequence the most to make it feel like the sounds were coming from different sides of the room.  

In relation to Cheon’s modes of listening I used both Reduced and Causal listening. Throughout the dream sequence, there is speech that’s slowed down, you can’t really tell if someone’s talking or if it’s noise. I would say this aspect of the audio byte involves Reduced listening, because the words in the speech isn’t what matters–it’s the mood that the drawling voice gives. I used my dad saying “Maybe it’s karma, maybe it’s…” throughout the dream sequence as well, these words don’t really have a meaning in their own. The words are used to set the mood of the piece and get information about what’s going on inside of the dreamer’s mind.

Both audio bites from online are from freeaudio.com