Our team’s audio piece will be based on the festivals and holidays within our different cultures and emphasise the impact that the colour red has on our memories and our lives. Since we all have the sound of some sort of bells in each of our pieces, we were thinking of using that as the transitional sound between each clip to make our piece flow and sound cohesive.

In both my Chinese and Indian culture, red is an extremely prevalent colour in all festivals, and is a very powerful colour as it is associated with gods. The red colour used in powder form in  many Indian festivals is an incredibly bright, dominant colour, as shown in Steve McCurry’s photography, and I have attempted to capture the loudness and strength of the colour in my audio piece. Using sounds from Chinese New Year Lion Dance performance in my building (video above), Chinese Drums, the jingling of my Indian earrings, my family’s prayer bell at home, and Indian festival songs, I fused the two cultures together to create the piece below. I also included a song that was always played in my primary school during Chinese New Year, and a recording of myself saying “xin nian kwai le” (Happy New Year) and “kung hei fat choy” (wishing you great happiness and prosperity) in Chinese, then edited the pitch to make it sound like a child’s voice.

After we all made our individual pieces, we put our pieces together and experimented with different types of bell sounds to use and transitional sound effects that can make our piece flow. Below is the rough cut of our audio-piece:

Once we played it on the big speakers in our classroom, we were able to notice some issues we wanted to work on:

1. The sound levels for our individual pieces were all different, so we had to keep changing the volume while it was playing
2. The sounds levels for specific sounds within each piece were too loud and distracted from other sounds – e.g. the earrings in my piece
3. Rearranging the order our pieces go in, and try adding Eneya’s piece – based on Christmas – to the end as it gives our piece a relaxing end to the loud and exciting sounds from the other three sections
4. Create and opening and ending that helps the listener feel satisfied by the experience

An additional aspect we would like to explore, is making our whole piece sound more compositional by interweaving some elements within all our pieces to make it operate as a whole rather than four separate sections.

Final Outcome:

Eunice Chan, Breanna Chin, Disha Shetty, Eneya Joshua (in order of audio sections)

This audio piece is a reflection of the emotions and memories we associate with the colour red – a colour we felt had great significance in all our cultures. We particularly focussed on the colour’s prevalence in cultural festivals such as the Dragon Boat Festival, Chinese New Year, Ganesh Chaturti, and Christmas. We each had different associations to red, and my section of the audio aimed to convey the strength and power that the colour evokes, from my perspective, mainly due to its associations with the gods from my cultures. 

The visual we created to accompany the audio was a graphically designed image of bells from our different cultures layered on top of each other on a red background. The red background fades into white to allude to the morphology of our audio, which starts of strong and fades into softer, relaxing Christmas sounds.