Final Soundscape Reflections

[benmiller314]

This is a space where you'll be able to post your final-for-now thoughts on your audio unit projects, your soundscape narratives. We'll talk in class about what these reflections need to include, but at a minimum I'd expect to see:

• at least 500 words describing the work you did
• at least two screenshots showing your work in progress
• at least one photograph of a notecard with feedback that you responded to in revising (and please say how)
• your own assessment of how you met the baseline criteria for the class, as well as aspirational criteria as appropriate

This will be due on Tuesday, February 5th.

[christyh310]

Acting Like a Child

Creating Soundscape As I started this project, I knew that I wanted to use a poem that I wrote, called “Acting Like a Child”, and set my soundscape at a playground to remind listeners of the days of blissful recess times of playing tag in mulch and jump-roping, and to contrast this childhood scene with the way that we view children as we ourselves mature. To highlight the contrast of the dignity of children with the way we may view them, I first asked some friends and classmates what came to mind they heard the phrases “acting like a child”, or “acting childish”. The first few sounds that I recorded and put in Audacity, then, were background playground noises, my poem, and a response from my housemate as shown below: The background playground asset was obtained from a YouTube channel, specifically from the video “Ambience Background Noise – Kinder Spielplatz Geräusche SOUND, references in my assets and sources page. Thank you to this channel for this sound! It created a beautiful culmination of running, playing, screaming, and laughing that I think helped set my soundscape in a distinct place. For each response from a friend or classmate, I tried to fit it primarily into the background noise first before layering more sounds on top – for example, I put the response “a toddler screaming” right after a child in the background screams, and I put the response “playing” and “spongebob” right before a child sings/hums a lovely and silly song to himself while walking on the playground. I wanted the reiteration of these responses with the background noise to help the listeners truly latch on to these responses, considering what they would answer to the question as well. To incorporate a personal recorded sound that was not voice and to layer the playground setting/youth narrative, I put in a jump-rope sound. Unfortunately, there were some changes to how I imagined this would’ve sounded – instead of recording it in my gym class, perhaps with chatter, and a beaded rope for a better/more distinct sound, I ended up having to record it on my own with a plastic rope in a racquetball court, so I know that the sound has an undesirable echo and isn’t as clear as I’d like. With time constraints, I wasn’t able to record sounds in my gym class as I’d hoped, but I still wanted this sound and so I tried to incorporate it into my soundscape. To continue the story of the playground, and match the shift in tone of my poem with a shift in tone in the surrounding sound of my narrative, I wanted to give the listeners a cue that this time of ‘recess’ was over, just as the line of the poem says “So, we learn, we’re not enough until we are an adult on our own”. I created this transition in two ways: first, with a door slam and the shade (‘mystery’) sound, and then with a whistle. I wanted to use a door slam sound (from Door Slam sound effects, Big Horns Intro performs Audionautix with a Creative Commons Attribution license, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRHw8nkLhSs&t=22s) and shade (‘mystery’) sound to depict the period of a teen/young adult’s life where they create clear separation between them and their parents, as they go through high school and eventually college, ultimately resulting in a dorm room that is completely separated from home life. I then implemented a whistle noise, because any child would recognize that as letting them know recess (which in my soundscape can more broadly mean childhood) is indeed over. As I continued to listen to my poem, I realized that just spoken word without the background of the children playing was a bit flat, and so I included a rain sound. As I listened and modulated the rain sound to fit the poem, I began to realize that rain is a great reason for the recess to end, or at least pause – but perhaps resume later. I ran with this idea. When my poem lightens in tone, remarking on how regal and loving children are, I brought the playground sounds back, but since it had just rained, I wanted to signify this with another layer of sound. What better way to do this then sounds of jumping in puddles! Both the rain and the puddles were not my own recordings; they are from the YouTube audio library (walking in mud puddle sound effect https://www.youtube.com/audiolibrary/soundeffects), and the YouTube channel "Free Sound Library" channel (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTdyXszrxhMP-pbhy85Pa-g), respectively. A screenshot of a more updated version of my soundscape is below, with the puddles and more responses are included. After editing and arranging these sounds, I thought about a recommendation from Ben that I got about perhaps using a music clip for background, to again help guide listeners about the tone and shifts within the narrative. I really enjoy the song Rivers and Roads, and after recording and implementing the introductory portion of this song with my poem, I realized that I quite liked the contrast between the beat of the song, and the ‘beat’ of the poem. They are not in sync, and I realized this after implementing the sound. But, instead of changing the speed or rhythm of the recording, I left it, because I think the rhythmic ‘dissonance’ of the song vs. poem serves my soundscape well by pointing to the dissonance between our thoughts about children and their actual dignity, integrity, intelligence, and importance. Additionally, implementing the Rivers and Roads clip allowed me to create a bit of depth, and have more than three overlapping sounds within my soundscape: Feedback I appreciated giving and receiving feedback on the soundscape, and it was helpful to read what others noticed within my narrative. One piece of feedback said that there was a lot of background noise/unpleasant feedback sounds during some of the responses. I definitely agreed with this, and had tried initially to modulate the sounds, through noise reduction and amplify tools, so they (all of the responses) were all the same volume but sacrificed the natural sound of the person’s voice in the process. Therefore, after reading this feedback, I imported these assets again, re-edited the sound to make it more natural even if one response remained a bit quieter than the others. Unfortunately, with the recording of a friend saying “Spongebob”, I was unable to make this much clearer. Another piece of feedback suggesting to have more of the background playground asset play near the end of my soundscape. I decided not to implement this feedback for a few reasons: first, the end of the poem focuses on us, the listeners, and our thoughts, whereas the parts where it talks about how children love, and when I say “wild and free”, I decided to include the noises of children playing, because it’s more suited here. I wanted to draw attention to these last words of the poem near the end of the soundscape, so had reduced the number of sound layers here intentionally. Things I learned about Git, GitHub and audacity This is the first time I have used Git, GitHub, and Audacity. The main functions in Audacity that I utilized include amplify, noise reduction, labeling, clipping boundaries, and change tempo. I tried to use fade in/fade out or even the adjustable fade, but I couldn’t quite make those functions work with the assets and timing I was using. I wanted to be able to control the exact reduction in volume, so I implemented negative amplification until I got the layering that I wanted. This allowed me great flexibility, because then I could tailor the fade in/out to be suited for introducing or layering the next sound clip. At first, I was pretty overwhelmed by Git because it was fairly new to me. Also, it brought back some scary (and yet helpful) memories of my days using Unix in freshman engineering. I was able to draw a bit on these thought processes to understand Git and tried to ask a lot of questions to make sure I understood what was going on conceptually. My friend, a Computer Engineering major, pointed me to some helpful websites and these resources in combination with the one’s provided in class let me get a basic understanding to be push and pull my project to and from GitHub. How I met the baseline/aspirational criteria: Although I described many of the criteria above, I wanted to clarify the ways I achieved the baseline and some of the aspirational criteria. With my reading of the poem I wrote, and the responses from classmates and jump-rope asset, I have about 1.5 minutes or more of original recordings, recorded by me. Between the 1:45-2:00 minute mark, the playground background, poem reading, rivers and roads clip, and puddles over lap 2-3 times. My entire soundscape is just under 3 minutes in length. And, through the more detailed description above, there are several changes during my soundscape, but most distinctly the whistle blowing and door slamming indicated the ‘end of recess’ depicts a clear tone, narrative, and sonic change. Through careful arrangement and using the amplify tool, I tried to align the volume and meaning of the sounds appropriately. I included the mystery sound along with the door slam for a good layer and more drastic slam effect. Lastly, I was able to use GitHub for commit/version history.

[jennyaimei120]

reflection.docx

[tessasayers]

Ballin' Out

For my soundscape project, I portrayed a journalistic view of a basketball game. I started with a Mac Miller song that is commonly hear at the games and then went into a quote from basketball head coach Jeff Capel. After that interview, I went into more of the game. I incorporated fans cheering and the sound of basketballs, basketball shoes, one comment was to also include the swish of a basketball, so I used the mystery recording to imitate that sound, along with more music.

One thing I got comments about was to make more basketball sounds and make them more prominent in my piece. I did that by expanding some of the sounds over the music and starting them longer. It was hard because there were basketball sounds in with the shoes squeaking and I didn’t want to lose the shoes. I tried to overlap a single basketball with those sounds, but it sounded like two balls dribbling at once and didn’t make sense to me. So, to fix that, I added more sounds and increased the volume of those sounds and deceased the volume of overlapping sounds to make it sound more prominent.

One thing I really tried to do was make this make sense for people who weren’t as into and didn’t know as much as basketball as I do. I tried to break up the basketball sounds with the crowd cheering and tried to put the recordings in places so they would describe what the audience just heard. For instance, I had a countdown with a missed shot at the buzzer and the crowd sighing in disappointment. After that, I had quotes from the Louisville coach, saying he was disappointed in his team because they lost.

I thought I layered my sounds well and used layering a lot in my piece. I was worried about this in the beginning, but as I started to do it, it became more natural. I found it was best to layer basketball sounds, the crowd cheering and the buzzing to single the end of a game. I also thought it was good to layer music with all of it, especially the interviews because it added another element to what the audience was hearing.

I have never used audacity before, but do have some experience with premiere. While they were similar, audacity did have some of its differences. It took a little bit, but once I got used to audacity I got going. I did my best to experience with some of the different effects, like the echo effect, but after playing with it a couple times I realized it didn’t sound as good as it did plain. I also experienced a lot with the sound of the screen to make it sound more like the swish of a basketball by changing the pitch.

The tool I used the most in audacity was the fading tool. I found this the most useful to get my sounds to a good, level volume and to help make everything sound more natural by fading it. I also got feedback about the sounds in the end of my project being too abrupt, so I took my time to listen to that and work on the fading to make it sound more natural, in the end I think it turned out really well.

While I am really proud of my project and seeing it come to life how I wanted it to, I am most proud of myself for using Git. Prior to this class, I had no experience with the command line or git, so using it was a big step and I think I have it down, at least for the most part.

Overall, I know I did my best on this project and I am happy with the steps I made, challenging myself along the way.

[laurasosovicka]

Living the Life of Liv

My roommate, Liv, leads an interesting life so I thought it would be cool to follow her around and show you what a typical day looks like for her. She is a sophomore neuroscience major, so she is always stressed out and busy. The beginning consists of her waking up process as she struggles with facing getting out of bed. Her iPhone alarm goes off and she says "ugh," and snoozes it. You can hear her shift position in bed and the sounds her sheets make. Her alarm goes off again and she gives in by saying "fine," and gets up. You hear as she gets ready for class. The front door opens along with the sounds of brushing her teeth, blow drying her hair and zipping up her backpack before she shuts the door. Then, she presses the elevator button and you hear it dinging as it travels to the eighth floor. It dings again once it reaches the floor and the doors open, then you hear her footsteps as she gets on it.

She then receives a text message when hearing a ping sound. The sound of Fifth Avenue is heard in the background as she is walking to Starbucks. People chatting and coffee machines overlap with the sound of Fifth. A motorcycle speeds off as she goes back outside, then the scene transitions back to the dorm. You can hear her typing vigorously on her laptop while the Keeping Up with the Kardashians theme song overlaps in the background. There are two snippets of famous Kardashian quotes said in different episodes that overlap as well. Page flipping and pen clicking become the main sound you hear. Liv says in the background, "ugh I hate this," then yawns 10-15 seconds later. These two sounds overlap with the page turning and pen clicking. The Soundscape switches into a few minutes of Chopin's Nocturne op. 9 No. 2. As that plays, you hear her open the microwave to insert food, along with beeping as she tells it how long to heat it. The hum of the microwave can be heard in the background as it overlaps with Chopin. The sounds of page flipping and notetaking come at intervals as seen below:

The microwave beeps a second time, signaling her food is ready. You hear her open the microwave as she takes it out. The Soundscape transitions into taking a shower. Liv opens the shower curtain and turns on the water. It runs for a while as it gurgles into the drain. The sound of the water fades out into her receiving a text message and typing out a response on her phone. Another ping goes off for an incoming text and she resumes typing another message in response. She puts her phone down for the night and yawns again, signifying the end of her day.

A common theme my notecards said were to overlap sounds. Having thought I lost my project the night before, I didn't have time to do that. However, I did take the advice given and layer specific moments. For example, one suggested I layer her saying ugh with the alarm, which I did. Another said I should have her say something while she was flipping the pages, which I also did. Another thing I was told was to take advantage of the effects Audacity provided.

The most important thing for me with this project was to make it relatable for everyone. We're all college students who oftentimes struggle with balancing schoolwork and socializing. Like Liv, we experience a lot within one day and are exhausted by the time it's done. We try to fit in so many obligations within a 24-hour time period. For instance, the snoozing the alarm and trying to go back to bed was one I thought everyone could relate to. Also, listening to study music while studying a textbook. So I hope my content resonates with everyone and makes them laugh thinking about how their day plays out.

I did not realize how necessary the effect options were until I began to try them out. The one I liked the most and used frequently was the amplification tool. I found it handy when wanting to emphasize a specific sound and draw the listener to. I also took advantage of the fading in/out and noise reduction. Both of those also made my Soundscape come together. These tools definitely helped make each sound cleaner and seem professional almost. I really enjoyed using the sounds to improve my project, especially messing around with them to see what sounded the best.

I'm someone who is unfamiliar with the programs we are using for the class. I was worried I wouldn't be able to figure out how to use Audacity, especially since this was my first time working with it. I had my doubts when I saw all that it entailed towards the beginning. However, learning how to navigate it was pretty simple after a while.

I met the criteria for the assignment in the time range and by layering my sounds in an orderly way. At first, I was confused as to how layering occurred, but with the help of Tessa and Ben, I realized it wasn't that difficult. I was leery about layering Liv's getting ready process and listening to music while studying. But it came out sounding really great and I wanted the listener to be able to close their eyes and envision themselves in her shoes experiencing her day. I felt those two parts were very strong in accomplishing that goal.

This project didn't come easy, as I faced several mishaps while completing the assignment. Thinking I lost my project and Audacity locking me out of itself made me very frustrated. But I was determined to overcome the obstacles and give the assignment my best effort. I am proud of myself for solving these issues on my own and really feel I gave this Soundscape my all.

Even though this is only the first project, I feel I know more about computer programs than I did before I took this class. I know there is much more knowledge to retain and I am looking forward to it. From knowing nothing about Git's existence prior to the class to where I am now, I would say I've come pretty far. I enjoyed Audacity more than I thought I would and might even use it for future projects.

Overall, I am very happy with how my project turned out and can't wait to start the next one.

[bcy5]

A Silent Traveler When we first started the sound project, I wanted to step out of my boundary in order to learn as much as possible about the world of sound editing. Because I have a very limited but still a small amount of experience with using Audacity, I wanted to create something that was more challenging than putting together a handful of sounds together. I wanted to tell a story that is somehow unique to me, but also is something that everyone can enjoy and acknowledge. I found my inspiration from video games. At first, I built the skeleton of my project by using sounds to set a setting for my story. In my case, the setting was a busy yet peaceful town, where my main character is going to start off his journey. My initial setup looked something like this:

Because telling an intricate story with voice narratives, ambiance, and sound effects is complicated, I realized that I was adding more and more lanes, to a point where I had to start combining tracks into the same lane by the type of sound (ambiance, voice, sound effect, etc). After experimenting with different sound effects and creating a layer of flesh and skin to my "skeleton", I came up with a mostly completed but definitely not polished result that looked something like this:

From here on, I was unsure of how to improve my project toward perfection. Given my limited sound recording technology, I felt like my project was completed to the best of my ability. However, after spending a day in class doing peer review/workshop, I stumbled upon an advice that helped me resolve my issues.

Among the other helpful advice, this one helped me the most because I learned how much of a difference a simple process of fading in/out sounds and amplifying sounds could be. Because my recordings were of that of many different ranges of sounds (some loud, some quiet), I often ran into issues where some parts of my recordings were too quiet or too loud in my rough draft. However, by utilizing the amplify effect on Audacity, I was able to control the volumes of individual sounds to either emphasize certain sounds or de-emphasize certain sounds based on my wants and needs. Not only that, the fade in/out options helped me find a way to combat the abrupt starting and ending of sounds. It added a dimensional effect, just like how we as humans perceive sound. After spending some time tinkering with the special effects function in Audacity, I ended up with a polished up version of my project that looks something like this.

Although my project is not up to standard of that of narratives made by professionals, I am happy with where I got with my project. This was a challenging experience that although I ran into many instances of trouble not only with figuring out how to use many unfamiliar functions of Audacity, but also trying to figure out how to utilize git and github.

I think that I have definitely met the baseline criteria because I have used many self-produced assets, while using only a few outside sources, my audio is just over the 3:30 minute mark, and there are many instances where at least 3 pieces of audio overlap one another, not to mention that there is a definitely change in setting (and its audio changes that come with it) within my narrative. I even went as far as overlapping 4 pieces of audio files at once, while challenging myself to utilize small bits of recordings with heavy editing rather than long, simple pieces of audio files.

Overall, I am satisfied with the story about the Silent traveler, who showed up to a town in distress to save the day. I was not only able to incorporate my unique persona by incorporating my interest in video games into my project, but I was also able to create a narrative that can be understood and enjoyed by anyone and everyone.

[mpalko]

Love and Attention

When I originally began this project, I wasn’t sure where I wanted it to go. I decided that I would record sounds and hope that something would just come to me. After asking people what they thought love was, I knew that the way people spoke about it was so abstract and beautiful. Plus, everyone had a different response. I love how my friends had described it as “tough” or “terrifying”. It is not always happy. But still, I knew I was missing a huge part of the assignment. What did I want in the background? After thinking about what I thought love was, I knew that I had a title for the project and what I wanted to incorporate in the background.

To start off in terms of completing the baseline criteria, I contained more than 1 minute of original sounds by me. Most of my sounds were original recordings. I did have three layers of track overlapping as shown below.

It played for over 2 minutes. The beginning was me speaking and the end was also me speaking, but the background noises were different.

(sorry that this is rotated. It won't let me do it vertically)

In terms of the feedback I received, many of them said they did not understand the background noises. Because of this, I went and recorded an introduction explaining what the sounds were supposed to represent.

I think this helped clear up what my audience thought they were hearing. In addition, Tyller said that Ryan was speaking very quickly in the beginning. I looked up how to change the speed of his voice and decreased his tempo, so that you could more clearly hear what he was saying about Kayla. After learning how to do more effects, I normalized most of the ocean and other background noises as Christy recommended. I also did a smoother transition between the ocean and my singing.

Many of the sounds I was looking for were hard to find. I did a lot of searching on freesound. I originally had multiple sounds, but I narrowed it down to three because I felt that those best fit the mood and the words that people were saying. I liked how the ocean crashed with certain phrases and how the tennis ball fit Sam’s beat of her words. It was those little things that mattered to me.

How I went past the baseline criteria was first, most of the entire soundtrack are sounds that I recorded. In addition, I did a lot of trimming of each person's interview. I had to specifically seek out what I wanted. Sam’s interview was pretty long, and it took a while to figure out exactly what I wanted to include. I used Github the entire time, and I had never beforehand used the command line so that was a learning curve for me as well. (Also, sorry about creating a separate Final Project sounscape. I did that the minute after you said don't change the file name, so I apologize, but you can still see how I had multiple versions of that file and the final file) I have a lot of overlapping sounds at almost every point in the soundscape; there’s at least two overlapping sounds at a time. I used the normalize, slow, and tempo change effects in Audacity. I have never before used Audacity, so learning to work with this software was a cool skill to learn. Something personal, I never sing for other people. Consider yourself special if I sing for you because most times I am very embarrassed to sing for anyone. By putting this in my soundscape, I think I told myself that I was good enough for other people to hear me. That was special, and probably one of the most defining parts of the whole piece even though it played for a very short time.

Overall, I hope people smiled when they heard Ryan talk about Kayla, and I hope people felt the deep meaning of terrifying when Sam spoke about it. My soundscape was also about relating to the words. In the background, it was an homage to me. It was about how I found love in everything I did. I liked that it was a mix of people's opinions and my own. Love is about attention, and I also wanted to input that you should love yourself and that is why I included my singing and what I love to do.

[ZAR17]

This soundscape begins by powering on the computer. Next you'll be able to hear some typing as I log into my computer. I used the effect "Amplify" to make the keystrokes more apparent. The effect "Noise Reduction" was used throughout the entire project on all of my original clips. I was able to remove background noise by creating a "Sound Profile" on the isolated background noise, and removing that same sound from the entire project. Notice how when I speak, all you hear is my voice. The mystery noise you might wonder "what is that?" is an app called "Discord" opening up. (Discord is a program that allows you to join voice calls with other people, typically used for gaming. Similar to TeamSpeak). Then you'll hear me give a command to Siri, telling her to put on a song. All of Siri's responses are clips that are cut from me having (many) other conversations with her. Getting Siri to say exactly what you want her to say in the script is extremely difficult and time consuming. The clip of the song by disturbed was reduced in volume by lowering the decibels in "Amplify" effect. After the music is abruptly ended, I began to set the true stage of the soundscape. Here I transitioned from sitting still at my desk listening to music, to getting up, grabbing my keys, and going to get coffee. You'll hear multiple clips overlaid at the same time as I'm walking down the stairs, while singing to myself. At 2:10 in the project you'll hear the sound of the car door closing behind me as I sit down into the car. Here in the project I began to sing more clearly, and closer to the microphone to deliver the desired effect that I'm sitting in a quiet car with good acoustics, as the car's engine is started. It's one of my proudest moments in the project. As the car's engine turns over, that is actually the end of that clip. I placed another clip of the engine accelerating directly after the one of the engine turning over. I was able to isolate a portion of this clip, copy it, and paste it again to simulate a driving sound as if the gears were shifting. I hope you're surprised to find out that in actuality, they were not. The effect "Fade in" and "Fade out" were also used on the engine clip, which is my most engineered audio sample of all. Due to the linearity of the time scale in this project, I was forced to incorporate an audio que that would signal that time is being sped up. I chose to use the clip from Spongebob because it's widely known, and also because at the end of the clip there's an audio signal that sounds like a beep to let the viewer (in this case, listener) know the scene has been cut. This effect transitioned perfectly into my clip of the Starbucks barista taking my order (whom I let know in advance I was recording our conversation) because there were similar sounding beeps in the background of target as other customers had their items scanned in the check out. Unfortunately I don't believe he was too enthusiastic I chose him of all people to record for "my school project", and he didn't say anything after I placed my order. The audio segment where you can hear "Sure thing man, coming right up" is actually me speaking over the background noise of the Starbucks in Target. I held the microphone far away from my mouth and tried to sound a little 'nasely' to sound less like me and more like him. This worked out for me because I tried having a humorous soundscape, so nothing like a little impersonation to have some comedic relief. I chose to leave in the background noises of the coffee shop due to purity of the sound, if they were removed then scenery of the soundscape would be diluted by sounding too staged. The final audio portion is of me tapping the straw against a flat surface, and sticking the straw into the drink followed by me sighing of relief and saying the drink is delicious. I chose to end the soundscape there in part because the length requirement had already been met as well as the fact that the same sounds would have to be played again in the opposite order to set the stage back at my apartment, which would be extremely redundant and distasteful.

The feedback I received was good considering my soundscape wasn't able to play due to technical difficulties. There were words of encouragement for some of the clips, indicating which ones were good and which ones were quiet, etc. I ended up changing the narrative of my soundscape to include these audio clips, because going into class I had decided that I was going to not use roughly half of them so that I could focus more on a narrative surrounding my conversations with Siri. Had it not been for the feedback, me going to Starbucks would have either not been in the soundscape or it would've been a much shorter journey. Notice the change of dates, the progression of the "Master" line of the very top, as well as how many more layers were added indicated by the length of the scroll bar.

As detailed in my description of my project I believe I met the baseline by having several minutes of clips recorded by me. The only ones that were pre-existing were the songs, the record scratch, as well as the spongebob cut scene. What changed in the soundscape is actually the physical space where the events took place. It began in my room, transitioned down the stairs, into my car, and ultimately to a Starbucks in Target in East Liberty. There was one instance of a 3 sound overlap. It took place when I'm walking down the stairs singing to myself and the keys are jangling. I believe I exceeded expectations because of my meticulous use of background sound removal, which was used to make it sound like less of a pre-recording. I made sure that no feedback was heard throughout the soundscape, where the decibels exceeded the output rate of 0 (The green bars never turn red). As previously stated there is a mystery sound, which happened in the beginning when the Discord App is opened (After the typing).

[jlherrle]

What is happiness?

I have always wondered what makes people the happiest. When you’re walking down the street and you see someone smiling. Is it because its a beautiful day out and there is not a cloud in the sky? Is it because they just got left class after taking a test feeling like they nailed it?

When I first started my project I was focusing a lot of my time on interviewing people. I thought that I wanted to base my whole project on interviews and hearing what people had to say when I asked them what happiness was to them. After conducting my interviews it hit me that maybe I should express happiness not only by interviews by but sounds. This is when i decided to search for sounds that make people happy.

As I mentioned previously, I wanted to collect sounds as well as interview people on what happiness is to them. Out of the five people I interviewed, I added 3 of their answers into the project. I selected their interviews because I felt like their answers were all very different. One girl said that happiness to her is when she gets an email saying that her class is cancelled. Another girl told me that happiness to her is being with her friends and family. When I was interviewing people it came to my attention how everybody has different things that make them happy. The last I interviewed mentioned to me that happiness to her is a sound. She told me that when she is laying on the beach, feeling the sun radiating off of her skin, happiness to her is hearing the waves crashing and the seagulls. That is why I selected a sound of seagulls and a sound of waves crashing as 2 of the 10 sounds in my project. When imported those sounds into my project I decided that it would be the perfect opportunity to overlap those noises.

Here is a picture showing the two sounds that overlap in my project.

It wasn’t easy for me to locate a lot of the sounds I wanted to find. The sounds that I were able to locate on free sound were not able to truly capture the noises and how they could make people happy. One of my audio clips is of my friends and I laughing. To me happiness is laughter and being with my friends. It was important that since my happiness is laughing, that I recorded my own audio of being with my friends joking around and having a good time. Collecting an audio clip from free sound of a group of girls laughing would not be the same as having my own laughter as well as my friends as a part of this project. I took a lot of the constructive criticism I received from classmates to help me find sounds. The picture below gave me a lot of awesome ideas.

I truly hope that people enjoy my project and that after listening people will sit back and ask themselves what happiness is to them. Are they able to relate to the answers of the people I interviewed? Does the dog barking make them just as happy as it makes me? I want my project to create conversations between people and themselves.

[eaj34]

Hello?

My project began as an idea and was transformed to create a story. At the beginning, I'm not going to lie, I was a little bit defeated. Everything wasn't going right. Sounds weren't going into Audacity. I thought I had an idea of what to do with GitHub - I didn't. My hopes were down. After I had gone out and recorded some sounds, it actually became fun. I was constantly aiming an recording app (thanks to Ben for recommending!) and trying to figure out what sounds I could use and shape to be my own. I actually left my room just to record my car starting. Then, I had to face Audacity again. I had just finished recording conversation with my friends and I had begun to edit. Once the sounds were started to come together, I was becoming more optimistic, as well as my friends, who wanted to hear the finished product! After I compiled all the sounds together, I had created a story! It was so cool! And I found myself in bed just tweaking and changing little things to sound better, even after my day had long ended. I truly enjoyed this project and happy that I got to learn some skills with GitHub and Audacity.

For the baseline criteria, I had met them all!

• My soundscape was exactly 4 minutes long. A little on the longer end, however, in order to capture the story, a two minute sound would not suffice. I felt that a longer sound would have more time to create suspense. There is one point where she repeatedly gets one text after another. The time it took for me to slowly increase the suspense of the texts building up took me about 45 seconds to a minute. Therefore, it needed to be a longer sound.
• I had met the criteria of more than one minute of original recordings. It was easy with having conversations in my audio. I also had the recording of my car starting up. There were also little sounds, like typing, which had to be about 5 seconds or longer because a small clip of typing wouldn't make sense. Below I included a circled section of one of conversations. Taking up about 20 seconds.
• I had more than one original recording (car, conversation, notification pings, typing, etc.) which I used an app for. It's called Parrot (if anyone wants to use it in the future), and it was really helpful in getting and organizing the sounds I had recorded. I actually have to record a speech in my other class and plan to use the app for that!
• Below, I included a picture of how I overlapped three sounds at once. I couldn't get it in the picture, but there is background music playing throughout the entire soundscape. It was the music, typing, and office phone, and then the sound that Ben gave us.
• It is hard to show in a picture, but my soundscape did experience change. It goes from a morning routine, to an office, and then a surprise ending. So, in terms of change, it was a change of location for the girl.

For criteria beyond the baseline, I had attempted most, if not all.

• I was able to incorporate the shade sound that Ben had made! Unfortunately it made not stick out to most listeners, but it's there! When I first heard it, I was trying to figure out how to shape it to fit into my little world. I had listened to it over and over and thought it also sounded like paper crunching, so I figured I could put it in the background of my office scene! To make it seem more like paper crunching instead of a shade closing, I repeated the sound multiple times.
• Next, after I had finished most of my project, I wanted to push myself and see if I could use the effects. I thought an excellent spot would be in the background music to fade out and then back in during a serious part of the story. I also wanted the end to have multiple people walking at one time, however the sound I had was only one person walking. I played around with the echo effect and was able to make it sound like more than one person was walking, and boy was I excited.
• After my struggle with GitHub, I didn't completely write it off! I tried so hard to keep pushing my info and to keep posting to GitHub. I think I used it correctly and everything works fine! But just in case, I also posted it in Box. I think it was important for me to try to use GitHub so that I can mentally say that I did it and didn't just write it off. -As mentioned in the baseline criteria, I had overlapped four sounds in a few areas, and you can see it in the picture for that criteria above! Yet again, you can't see that I had music playing in the background as well.

• Finally, I think my transitions could have been more clear cut, but I did attempt to have some sort of transitions from house to car to office to car once again. My transitions more closely resembled the transitions that we heard in the "Day in a Life" example at the beginning of the semester. I tried transitioning by using conversation and walking. The conversation is said by the main character, saying "Gotta go to work" or "Gotta go home," which indicated a scene change.

  Peer Comments I love feedback on anything! It makes me a better composer!

There was a comment where that recommended that I indicate the meaning of the soundscape earlier. I had thought about doing this, however, I felt that it needed to be established that it was a normal day for this woman. Her daily routine, until it was interrupted by a phone call. Really, anyone's day could start off normal and then BOOM, not normal.

The final comment I received made me change the ended. I had created some suspense towards the end so leading up to the very end made sense, yet left it to the listener to decide what happened.

Overall, I overcame my fears of some technology (I still have a few), and this project was a great stepping stone and creatively got my ideas flowing! I am excited for future projects. I am proud of how far my project has come! As people listen, I hope they can fill in the blanks that I leave up to the imagination with their own images.

[abrous]

Initially for the Audacity project, my goal was to meet all of the aspiration criteria in addition to the baseline criteria but that was before I tried using Audacity with a chromebook. Since I realized the difficulty of using windows/mac programs on a chromebook the baseline criteria were difficult enough for me. I was able to record the majority of my sounds on my own, I would guess about 75% were my recordings from an indoor soccer tournament. There are multiple points in my soundscape with 3 or more overlapping sounds as seen in the screenshots in my shared Box folder. The soundscape is a solid 2 minutes and 1 second so while it is borderline close to the criteria it still meets it. As for the aspirational criteria, I tried my best to have meaningful fade in/out and sounds align together but I most definitely have 4 or more sounds overlapping at least once and I have 3 or more sounds overlapping multiple times throughout the soundscape. I was unable to use the mystery sound or use GitHub/the version history but I used some effects through Audacity. On the note cards (also on Box) it was mentioned that the ‘injury’ sound was not necessary twice. This was a misunderstanding that was my fault; I had not yet added in the vocalization of “earlier at the soccer tournament” to directly tell the listener that it was a foreshadowing event. Multiple people also made it clear that it sounded like a basketball game so I made sure the vocals had specified that it was a soccer tournament. This project was really difficult for me and if I am being honest, I am still not happy with my final product. I am not happy with it because I do not feel that I could use Audacity to the best of my or it’s abilities since using Audacity on a chromebook was not good from the beginning. Downloading it and being able to use it properly (including exporting and saving files) took close to a week that I needed to be working on it. Once the program was running, it only lasted about 20 minutes prior to the screen freezing completely and forcing me to save/export the file that I was in the middle of, close out of the program, go into my settings and force it to be shut down within the background and then re-open the entire program and file again to try to find and remember where I left off. This lead to a very incredibly frustrating overall process. That being said, every little victory I had was great, I am happy that I was able to produce something along the lines of the criteria, I really hope that the future projects (and the programs within) do not give me such a difficult time, and I hope that I will eventually be able to learn to properly use GitHub from the command line on my Chromebook.

[tyllerbarner]

Coffee Cart Conversations:

For my Soundscape project, I wanted to highlight a place that I spend a decent amount of time at; the Coffee Carts around Pitt’s campus. A lot of my friends work or have worked at these carts, and I usually go there to study and keep them company while they are working. My first thought for the project was to just incorporate a normal day for a worker, which in my mind would include some of the typical background noise of the coffee cart, customer interactions, coffee being poured and I was originally planning on just including those sounds. However, after visiting Ben in office hours, he gave me the idea to create a kind of quirky conversation between two co-workers.

I decided to incorporate this idea by creating a conversation between my two friends, Jenn and Michaela (I changed the names to Jane and Maya), that centered on two co-workers who ask each other interesting questions, however, at the end of the soundscape there becomes this response of longing. I wanted the beginning of the Soundscape to focus on establishing the location and what this location would sound like. Along with this, I wanted to display how repetitive the days can become for the workers and how these co-workers would break up the repetitiveness with their questions. By the end of the Soundscape, however, I wanted to display a sense of longing for something different and new. This is where my shift happens, and there isn’t really a resolution at the end, which is something that I wanted to include from my initial planning.

Throughout the process of creating this project, I found myself becoming both frustrated but also enjoying myself through the process. While at first, I didn’t really know how I was going to approach the topic of my project, and later, how I was going to execute this using Audacity and GitHub, towards the end of the project I found myself actually actively and willingly playing around with different effects, tweaking the ways in which something came across, and becoming more comfortable with using Git at the command line. I enjoyed this project, not only because I was able to learn something new, but also because I was able to get out of my comfort zone when it comes to editing material.

Baseline Criteria:

In terms of meeting the baseline criteria, I believe that I met them all. Going into the peer feedback class session, I really was struggling with figuring out what else to include and how else I could layer my Soundscape. And my beginning stages looked like this:

However, after receiving feedback and playing around with what I wanted to include, my project ended up looking like this: I added in a bit more layers and other sound effects, as well as, other transitional elements and other kinds of effects.

My Soundscape was around 3 minutes and 10 seconds long. When I first heard we had to create a project that was between 3-4 minutes (later changed to 2-4 minutes), I was nervous that I would not be able to meet that criteria. However, after starting my project, I realized that reaching 2 and even 3 minutes was easier than I imagined due to how I wanted the conversation and story line to develop.

I also incorporated, more than one original recording. Not only did I record the conversations between my friends and the customers, but I also made an effort to try and get actual recordings of the machinery and background noise that you would find at the Coffee Carts that they work at. I recorded the espresso machine, as well as, the cash register and the monotone background noise (which may be somewhat overshadowed by the chit chat and music in the background as well).

I also believe that while the change wasn’t that enormous or shocking, my soundscape did go through a change. The character Maya comes to a sort of revelation that being surrounded by the same kind of thing is something that she doesn’t really want and is unable to completely finish her thought about it, because as she’s speaking a customer interrupts her. The shift in mood changed from lighthearted to more of a longing and sense of being trapped and disappointed.

I also incorporated more than one minute of original recording. Meeting this criteria wasn’t very difficult for me since I recorded all of the conversations that took place, along with the espresso machine, cash register and monotone background noise. Besides the top track that says coffee pouring, the mystery sound, and the two bottom background tracks, everything was recorded by myself.

Finally, I did incorporate three layers of track overlapping throughout my Soundscape. Due to the fact that I had three layers of background noise to better set the scene, it wasn’t very hard to overlap other layers of sound as well to incorporate more overlapping layers. However, I do believe that I could have added more layers overlapping throughout the Soundscape, at various parts, whether that be other sound effects overlapping a conversation or other, less prominent (but more prominent than the background chit chat) happening while the two co-workers were talking.

Aspirational Criteria:

I believe that I made a solid effort to try and aspire to go beyond the baseline criteria. I have never worked with Audacity before, so at the beginning of this project I was nervous for how well I would have been able to even meet the baseline criteria. However, the more I played around with the effects and such, I was able to feel slightly better with using Audacity. One of the aspirational goals that I attempted to meet was to try out any effects. I began to rely heavily on the Amplify tool, in order to better hear certain parts of my audio. Another tool that I played around with was the fade in and fade out tools. There are two sections (besides the ending) where I fade in and fade out to better emphasize the effect I was going for. I have inserted those sections below.

Along with this, I also worked with the echo effect and the reverb effect. The echo effect was something cool that I wanted to insert somewhere in my project and I decided to insert it during Maya’s last section, with the suggestion from Christy. The reverb effect kind of gave me some trouble and I spent a few hours collectively, attempting to figure out where I wanted that effect to go and what I wanted the effect to do. I ultimately decided to include reverb where Jane was talking about going to space, to try and get into what an empty space like atmosphere may sound like and also to try and get inside her head without the background noise.

I also overlapped three or more layers in multiple sections. As mentioned above, since I had three layers of background noise, I was able to reach the baseline criteria to include three layers of overlapping noise, so anything in between those layers was added onto that. There is one section where Maya is speaking and her echos are in the background and customer is saying “Excuse Me” while she is talking, which breaks away from the other sections throughout my Soundscape where the background noise is layered with dialogue or the sound effects of the coffee carts.

I also was able to incorporate the mystery sound. While I’m not too sure how well it came across, I decided to insert it to signify coffee beans being put into the top of the espresso machine.

Furthermore, I also made an effort to use Git at the command line and continue to upload my drafts as I continued to make changes and saves. I took a few screenshots at moments where I believed that I was making a decent amount of progress and I uploaded those to GitHub as well.

Peer Feedback:

The feedback that I received was very helpful. At the time of our peer review session, I wasn’t too sure where I wanted to go with my project and how I would be able to incorporate other aspects besides what I had already included. However, Christy, Emma and Lauren all mentioned to me that adding more descriptive sounds and more sounds in the coffee shop could better the outcome of the Soundscape.

I listened to Emma’s feedback where she mentioned adding background music and more descriptive sounds. I decided to add background music that would sound like something you may typically hear at a coffee shop. Along with this, Lauren mentioned getting more sounds from the coffee shop instead of just pouring. While I decided to keep the repetitiveness of the sounds in order to create that repetitive feel that I was going for, I decided to add an espresso machine and a cash register sound. These two sounds repeat throughout the Soundscape, just like the coffee pouring.

Christy’s advice to get more into Maya’s head prompted an idea to place echos of her saying “hi how can I help you,” over and over as she’s complaining about doing the same thing everyday. I also debated between having Maya answer the last question at the time of the peer feedback session, but ultimately ended up having it remain unanswered with a fade out at the end.

I feel as though I was able to achieve more than I thought I could have than at the start of the project. While I feel as though any project that I create is never finished, I am happy with how my project turned out based on the time frame given and my limited knowledge of Audacity. I really enjoy editing and I believe that this project was a great intro into another editing software that I can now use for other projects, both academically and personal.

[dashn98]

Showtime-- For my soundscape I decided to make the storyline about a dancer going to and from her big performance including all the sounds before, during and after the show. Originally as you can see in my soundscape preview, I recorded some simple tapping of myself but I felt that it was not as polished as it could be and recorded tapping at a Pitt Dance Ensemble rehearsal that I used instead. One of the main comments from my note cards was that the tap dance portion of my soundscape was a bit long. I received a suggestion to add another dance portion to the narrative. I took this advice and cut down the length of my tap portion and added in a ballet portion. I think this significantly made my piece more interesting. I also got a few comments that the transition around 10-15 seconds was rough. I made sure to move the sounds closer together and fade them more appropriately as I edited. In meeting the criteria, I surpassed the baseline of 1 minute of original recordings including about 1 minute and 80+ seconds of original recordings. All my original recordings were mine but one. I was given permission from Emma to use the sounds of walking that she recorded for her piece. I was able to meet the requirement of having three overlapping sounds three times throughout my piece which was part of the aspirational criteria. At the beginning I have two different recordings of car sounds along with the music overlapped. Around the middle the audience chatter, hairspray and deep breath recordings overlap, and right after the dance portion I have two different audience recordings overlapped with a person exclaiming “bravo!” I was able to meet the criteria of producing a soundscape in the 2-4-minute range with my final cut being about 2 minutes and 35 seconds. The piece very clearly changes from beginning to end with the different parts of the story line, meeting the final baseline criteria. I believe that I met the aspirational goal of having transitions occur at meaningful points. I made sure to use the fade effect when something new was going to occur. I was also able to incorporate the mystery sound as a background noise during the final portion of the narrative when the dancer walks back to the car. I had never had any experience editing sounds prior to this project so using Audacity was very new to me but I really enjoyed learning how to use it and make the sounds more natural. Some effects I used a lot were the fades and amplification. These effects helped me make sure what I was trying to portray seemed more genuine. While I was unfamiliar with Audacity prior to this project I was familiar with GitHub. In order to push myself a little bit more I decided to work with some features of GitHub I have not used before. The first feature I used was the project feature. I still have some understanding to gain with this feature and believe it would be more helpful in a group project, but I used it to list what I needed to record or obtain when starting the project. The other new feature that I used more throughout this project was the tag/release feature. Each time that we had a due date I tagged it as its own release. This feature makes it so you can go back to my GitHub page click releases and see a titled release for each due date, when you click on these it will show you what the repository had when I tagged it on that day. This makes it easier to see what was done for each specific deadline. Lastly, I learned how to link to different parts of my repo in the README. You can see on my repository that there is an easy to read table of contents at the bottom of my README making it easier to find the file you are looking for. Overall, I feel that I learned what was expected in capturing and editing sound using digital tools and sound as a medium as well as pushed myself to create something I was ultimately very pleased with.

[jfrank1120]

Working for the Weekend

When the idea of a soundscape project first appeared, many different ideas came to mind about what topic I could use in order to create mine. After having listened to the different examples from previous classes I decided that I wanted to focus on a simple topic but attempt to go in depth with the sounds that would occur with that scenario. At this point I began to look around me in my daily life for topics that were both simple, but also could be complex if broken down in the soundscape. The first thing that appeared to me was seeing grounds crew workers here at Pitt going about their day around campus. I knew that most of these workers did not only complete one single task during the course of their 8 hour day, so I decided that my soundscape should cover all of the possible tasks that they might be assigned within a day. This meant helping the listener understand the change of buildings around campus, what task was being done in that area, and if the worker was traveling at the time or stationary while working. I was easily able to create an assets chart that listed out the sounds I believed I needed, yet in the end I needed a lot more than I had previously envisioned when first planning.

Within my soundscape itself you can hear the worker starting their car to come to the university, listening to the radio as they do. For the radio noise I was able to pull a public domain song that was recorded for free use. Once I had added this clip into the project I then referenced an online tutorial that explained how to layer effects so that it sounded as if it was truly coming from a radio. This required using both an equalizer filter and then a high pass filter on the clip to emulate this sound. The worker then gets out of their car and begins the course of their day Once they arrive on campus they proceed to walk around the streets of the university sweeping and cleaning as they go along. After this point the worker then goes into the commons to have lunch among the students. I recorded this portion myself by sitting in a crowded area of Market Cafe where I usually see employees sitting when they are having a meal. This is then followed by going through different buildings around campus collecting trash, changing lightbulbs, etc. The soundscape is then closed out by the worker finishing their day going to their car closing the door and turning it on. All of these sounds I recorded myself while getting into my car and starting it.

First Screenshot Second Screenshot For the workflow of the project, I tended to start small and work outward once I felt a portion of the project was to my liking. This meant that at certain points I would only have about a minute or so of audio, but I knew that it was to my liking and would only need minor tweaks in the future. I felt that this helped me to focus on what the next portion of the soundscape needed to accomplish since I knew what was going to lead up to it.

In terms of responding to the reviews from my peers. All of them mentioned that my soundscape at that time was not long enough since it was about 2 minutes 45 seconds at that point. In response I then made sure to add an additional minute worth of sounds to fill out the day of the worker and add more to the story where I could.

One offering that was brought to my attention was adding more overlapping sounds to my project in order to fill out the environment. I was able to find the sound of what seems like a walkie talkie going off in someones pocket and used that in different areas of the soundscape to remind the listener that the worker is still on the job and interacting with others around him/her.

As for baseline criteria, my soundscape ended up being 3 minutes and 45 seconds long which was within the 2-4 minute range. A good majority of the sounds that are used within my soundscape are from my own recording or the recording of other students who had similar needs with their recording. In terms of transitions I feel that I did a good job changing from one scene to another with the sound of the door opening and closing while fading new background tracks in and out of the soundscape so that the listener could tell there was a change. As for effects, I was able to change the music in the car to sound more like a radio using different effects (as mentioned above) along with editing the "mystery sound".

For aspirational goals, I was able to use the "mystery sound" with some minor effects to sound like the crumpling of a wrapper while the worker is eating their lunch. Sound overlapping was one where I feel that I did a little better than average. There are a few points where I am able to overlap 3 different tracks without it seeming to busy to the listener. In terms of Github, I consider myself to be very well versed with Git so using it was not a challenge for me. However, when I ran into an error attempting to change file structure with the repository I had to use branching and git reversion which are tools I had only really heard about and used sparingly in other coursework. This did challenge me a lot and taught me the true value of having version control since if it had not existed I might not have turned my project in on time....

Oh and I definitely had fun so I guess I met that criteria!

[ghost]

Lauren Stanick Composing Digital Media Soundscape Reflection The work I did for this sound scape was very simple. I decided that I would be doing a day in my life and just record all the different sounds of things I do on a daily basis: hearing my alarm clock, brushing my teeth, brushing my hair, walking down the street, eating dinner, going to class, getting notes in rehearsal. Things like that. I wanted it to be as realistic as possible while still hitting the guidelines so I also added the coffee shop section where it sounds like I’m in a crowded café. This section, which was where I had four different audio tracks layered over one another during different points, was the most difficult section of audio that I had to find. I recorded myself for about half the sounds in my soundscape and took from Youtube or BBC free sound effects the other sounds. On both of the notecards, a criticism was that I had the alarm clock beeping for too long, which looking back on I agree. There were too many beeps to listen to, but I wanted to make it realistic considering the fact that it takes me forever to wake up in the morning for my early classes. I understand that for a listener it probably becomes tedious after the third or fourth time to hear nothing but a shrill alarm clock. I decided to cut a significant portion of my alarm clock sounds and begin the fade in to me brushing my teeth so the sounds were kind of layered. To be honest with myself and with the class, I had a difficult time meeting the criteria for this project. I was extremely frustrated with GitHub because I still am having a lot of trouble understanding how to push the data files from my computer to my repository. It is confusing for me and seemed like it made the project more difficult than was necessary. I have some prior experience with audacity so in that area, I had no problem cutting audio files and placing them exactly where I wanted them to be. In the future, I want to play with more fades and other sound effects within audacity so it sounds more fluid to the listener. Most importantly, I want to have a better understanding of how to work with GitHub. It’s extremely frustrating for me to have to use this software after not understanding how to commit audio files, even after going to office hours.

Please see Box file for Box link to soundscape_final_data folder

Please see my repository for the required screenshots of progress and note cards! :)

[Aba430]

A Walk Down Fifth When I first read the prompt for the soundscape project I immediately thought of the different stories I could tell. I wanted to present a soundscape that would take listeners on a miniature journey through a small part of my day. Although I manage to hear an array of sounds and interactions as a I walk down Fifth Avenue, I am also aware of my cell phone’s limitations in picking up all of those sounds. As a result, when I would play back a few of my recordings they often sounded monotonous and one-dimensional. I could barely pick up on the side conversations or the little of bit of nature that is present on this campus. Eventually, I accepted the fact that Fifth Avenue needed a bit of editorial magic. Initially, my soundscape was the product of a walk down Fifth Avenue in the morning and a walk down Forbes Avenue during the afternoon. Throughout those walks I focused in on the most interesting sounds, and I highlighted them by distributing them through the piece and increasing their volume as well. I wanted to transport the listener through the various points and bus stops along Fifth Avenue, however my soundscape started to sound like background noise and in certain areas it sounded like white noise. At first, I thought that was just what my project was meant to sound like, and then I received some much needed feedback from a few of my classmates. One of the notecards suggested I include dialogue in my piece such as ordering food from one of the eateries in Oakland. I included this in the second half of my soundscape, and even though it’s a brief clip, it does provide the piece with some differentiation. It gives the listener something to grab on to as they take in the other sound effects.

A couple transitional elements I utilized in certain areas of my piece were the sounds of a door opening and closing and periods of silence. For some reason, I believed that having moments of silence within a soundscape would be against the rules. After listening to the soundscapes of my other classmates I found that the periods of silence or calm worked really well as a set-up for a new sound clip. Then I incorporated the sound of a door opening and closing towards the end of my soundscape to help signal that it was coming to a close. The door clip also worked well as an introductory sound clip, and I decided to include it with a clip of myself telling my mother I’m on my way out. I then allowed this clip to overlap with the sounds of Fifth Avenue to illustrate that I was in fact stepping out into the public arena. The first portion of my soundscape is an overlap of the sounds of Fifth Avenue in addition to the sounds of the Starbucks area inside the Target on Penn Avenue. I needed to include some background chatter into my morning walk down Fifth, and while I do hear various conversations during my walk, my phone did not pick them up.

Overall, this soundscape project was not easy at first, but it definitely became easier as I learned to use Audacity. I feel that I’ve gained a new sense of appreciation for the movies and TV shows that I watch, because I now know that a great deal of effort goes into creating the sound effects and atmosphere of a scene. Although I still struggle with Git and I had to upload my soundscape onto Box, I know that if I can figure out Audacity I can learn to work with Git. My soundscape is within the 3-4 minute time frame the class suggested, and I did overlap a number of clips to create a more rounded out sound and listening experience.

[esc37]

"A Disruption" My soundscape narrative starts out with the "day-to-day" life as a Pitt student. It starts out with a normal routine - taking a shower, brushing teeth, drying hair, and putting things in a backpack to take to the library. The student is leaving her apartment to go to the library with her roommate/friend, with the background music indicated the happy and upbeat demeanor of the student. Suddenly, the scene changes with the student and her friend encountering someone that has collapsed. She assesses that the man needs CPR, as he has no pulse and is not breathing and instructs her friend to call 911. The student performs CPR and uses the help of the song, “Stayin’ Alive” to keep herself on beat with the right beats-per-minute, as she was instructed. Finally, the paramedics come and take the man away in the ambulance, leaving the student and her friend shocked and allowing them to continue with the day they had planned. Initially, I had thought that I would not have enough “sounds” or enough of a storyline to match the criteria for time, but by elongating and spending enough time setting up “the initial scene” allowed me to both meet the criteria for time, and allow for enough time playing the “a day in a life” role for the listener to be shocked or surprised at the plot twist. My soundscape ended up being 3 minutes, 2 seconds:

For my soundscape, I also made it a point to use mostly original recordings (recordings recorded by me) with the exception of “Stayin’ Alive”, and the initial piano background music, both taken from Soundcloud. I also obtained the “ambulance-siren” sound from Freesound, as it was difficult to record a clear ambulance siren. I used the “window-shade” sound to emulate the sound of an ambulance cot being taken out of the ambulance:

. All other sounds used besides the four listed above, were all original recordings by me. Time-wise, I would say that I recorded and used about 2.5 – 2.75 minutes worth of original sounds. For overlapping sounds, I had 4 sounds overlapping at 1 point in my piece, and 3 sounds overlapping at a different point in the piece, it is hard to tell from the screenshots, but I had “Stayin’ Alive” playing in the background, while the student is performing CPR, while counting out loud, while the friend is speaking to the 911 operator:

I also had 3 sounds overlapping while “Stayin’ Alive” is playing, the student is performing CPR and counting out-loud, and you can hear the ambulance sirens getting closer:

I would also say that I had transitions of music occurring at meaningful points in the narrative. The cheerful/upbeat piano music stopped when the student sees the man collapse on the ground, and “Stayin’ Alive” is essential to instruct the listeners of the importance of using music/this specific song to stay on beat when performing CPR. I also used several Audacity functions, including “Repeat”, “Change Pitch”, and “Change Tempo”, especially when altering the background music. Initially, the piano background music was not cheerful/upbeat enough so I altered the pitch and tempo so that it expressed what I wanted. To be honest, I did have some trouble while working on this project; this was the first time I had used Audacity, so it took time to get used to Audacity. Also, it was difficult to emulate and recreate certain sounds, so I had to improvise when recreating the sounds of CPR. It was also difficult to layer tracks and sounds to make the audio sound clean. As for the notecards, I altered and changed my soundscape, and added the CPR portion, as well as background music to include more of a change, and climax of the storyline.

[AnthonyCapretto]

Commute

When starting this project I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to capture. All I knew was that I wanted to make a story about something that I'm used to hear ing but take for granted all of the time. I believe that you can really learn a lot about yourself by how you reevaluate a portion of your day. With that being said, I decided that I wanted to make a soundscape that conveyed my commute to school and what that is like. Every day I take a few modes of transportation to get where I need to go, and it's a very long(and sometimes grueling) process. Due to this, I knew that I couldn't just turn in a two minute recording and call it a day, I wanted it to be long, and if the time limit was even longer I think I would've used even more time as well.

This is the image of my final project. As you can see, it's almost exactly four minutes long. There was a while I was struggling to cut it back because I felt as though the length was perfect. I soon realized that it wasn't going to end how I wanted it too, and that I was going to have to trim some fat which brought it down a little.

In terms of baseline criteria , I feel as though I've accomplished that and gone even beyond trying to meet even aspirational ones. I would say that at least half, if not more, of the sounds are original recordings that I took over the course of a few days too and from school. It's funny, you don't realize just how many sounds are going on around you till you start listening for them. Public transit is a cacophony of squeaks, rattles, conversations, and more that all meld together only to be pushed out by the listener.

The use of the mystery sound was one of the hardest things to implement. I didn't now how I was going to implement a shade into the story at first, but then I did a little editing on it and added a few effects. My goal was to make it sound like the door to the bus was opening and closing. If you've ever been on a city bus, you've heard this sound a million times as people get on and off. It's something so simple, yet so often forgotten. Really, I wanted to se how well I could edit it so that, 1. people would think it's a door, and 2. people wouldn't think much of it at all. I'm not sure if I completely succeeded, but I do believe it was a valiant effort that turned out about as well as I could've hoped.

Here I uploaded a picture of the location. I tried to make it seem like the opening and closing sound by lowering the pitch and changing the speed. Again, I believe it turned out alright, but I guess that's up to the listener.

As I talked about my length before, I met the criteria there quite easily. It's a longer project, it even comes across as a bit boring. I did this on purpose because it is. Commuting anywhere isn't interesting and exciting, it's just necessary, and everyone traveling with you just wishes to be somewhere else. It's a lonely thing even though you're with all of these other people. It changes quite literally, as I actually change the mode of transportation, going from a bus to the subway. As someone that's ridden them both so much, I think the sounds make it quite obvious, but to others they might not understand. That's why I wanted to add as much sound from each one. The ending just has the subway pulling away from the station and then fade off which seemed like a great way of showing that there's still more to come on the journey and this was only a part. I think If I was allowed to make it longer I could have done this to greater effect, but as it stands I'm content with it.

There are a few parts during the project where I layered three or even more tracks. Life has layers, and any one recording isn't going to convey all of the emotions that you want. All the different separate layers I tried to make work together in harmony, transitioning as though you were hearing them in the real world. I wanted it to seem like it all flowed in a fluid harmony throughout like it would in real life.

Here I circled them

Peer Opinions:

I tried to take all of the opinions of my peers into account, but this one the most. Like I said before, I wanted to leave the end to be a bit mysterious. So the sounds included in the end include clips from the subway station, including a clip of the music and the voice that usually plays overhead. I felt as though the music should come back on because it conveys that the journey is continuing. You don't know exactly where I'm going, and I kinda like that. I kinda like the idea that anyone could imagine them in this situation, it isn't exactly specific to me. Everyone commutes eventually.

I've also attempted to use Git throughout the project to varying degrees of success. I feel like once you get it running fluidly, it is such an effective way of working on a project and showing that to others. After I did my first draft, I thought I had it down pat, but then I ran into trouble while adding the changes I made towards my final draft. Regardless of this, I still aim to upload it through Git now. I feel like since I've made it this far it'd be a shame to give up now. Git is frustrating at first, using a command line interface like this is just such a culture shock to me, but I feel like jumping into it is the only way to really learn it.

Final Thoughts:

I ended up enjoying this project more than I initially thought I would. I was very worried that I was going to become overwhelmed with trying to come up with a clever idea for it, but sometimes the best ideas are the simplest. I really enjoy stories that just sort've explain everyday life. Things don't need to have a point to be entertaining; sometimes you just have to appreciate the mundane for the sake of being mundane and nothing else. I really want to do more stuff like this in the future to greater effect and I hope I take what I've learned here to accomplish that.