September 28, 2023
This project made us think about creating audio and mixing sounds to inform our audiences of a chosen environment: a “portrait of a place.” To practice recording sounds, we used a class day to practice with a Sony PCM-A10 recorder to capture sounds in New York within the radius of our building. We got sounds like traffic, bikers, crowds of people talking, and everyday things like the sounds of feet hitting the floor while walking, or an elevator bell. I ended up using a lot of these sounds in my final project.
For my final project concept, I wanted to focus on New York. I didn’t want to do this because we already got city sounds during our recording day, but because every Wednesday, I walk back to my dorm alone, and I’ve been loving taking in all the sounds of a somewhat quiet but still bustling city. I don’t come from a noisy town, so this was definitely an adjustment for me, but I’m still finding it nice to be immersed in the fact that this city is filled to the brim with people.
I started by layering a lot of sounds in order to have a consistent environment, using my longest city sounds as the base to build on top of. At some point, I realized that I shouldn’t keep using the same city sounds on top of each other because I only had about three different ones that I wanted to use in their own time, so I ended up recording a bit of the rain from the past week. Because I wasn’t using the high-quality Sony recorders, and because I took a video rather than an audio recording, I first put my rain sounds into Adobe Premiere Pro to separate the video and audio and clean the audio up a bit. I then exported it as an mp3 file to put into Adobe Audition.
To make the audio three minutes long, I decided to plan out a loose narrative to help me arrange the sounds. I visualized myself walking out of class, getting on an elevator, and leaving the building, entering the noisy New York City night, eventually getting back to my dorm and escaping the noise. I use walking sounds throughout to emphasize that the subject of the audio is walking through all the noise, utilizing the panning tools and volume controls to dictate where the sounds are coming from and when one or the other is closer to the subject. The image below on the right shows such an instance where I’m changing the pan and volume settings of one of the tracks, and the image on the left shows what the final mixer session looked like.
After going through this process and finishing this project, I’d say that this is probably one of the very few times I’ve been exposed to media that I don’t actively use to create art. While it was slightly hard to get used to using software like Audition, it’s definitely a useful skill to have if I ever find myself looking to fully utilize an installation space or even if I need to use it for a job or internship. It was fun knowing how to make an audible narrative sound how I want via new tools and software. The final project is at the top of the page.