After embarking on a sound-walk we were challenged to create a sound-walk of our own. The project was done in a group of three. I did it with Bomani and Sammy. The piece can be accessed in this link.
We started out by doing a brainstorming session. We were able to come up with roughly 30 ideas. We took note of the strong ones and started formulating not only the story that we want to deliver but also how we want to deliver it. The end result of this process is a script.
Once the script is ready, we started recording and to look for free sound samples that we could use throughout the internet. All three of us are voice acting in this piece. To make it more “natural”, we decided to do three full recordings; one with each one of us in the mic.
After the recording is done and all the samples are gathered, we started to edit using Adobe Audition. None of us had ever touched Audition before, but personally I find to be quite intuitive and relatively easy to play around with. It was fun.
Throughout the editing process which takes roughly 4-5 hours for a 3-minute piece, we found some missing and out of place things in the recording. To remedy this, we did another round of recording and tweaked the story a little bit to make it more cohesive and flows more naturally.
One of the things that we wanted to experiment on is to have the listeners interact with the piece in a way that transcends the listener from an audio-based world to the physical world. We did this by asking the listener to draw a picture at the end of the piece. At first, I was quite skeptical of this experiment, but after going through it, I am extremely glad that we decided to go through with it.
Looking back, this project involved a lot of effort, compromise, and tweaking around. It was a super fun project to do, and I am very proud of what we have created.
To actually enjoy what we’ve created, visit this link. You can start listening on the elevator lobby of 370 Jay St.
