My piece is two distinct acts that are separated in terms of tone instead of content. The first is a casual interview and the second is an introspective recount. On top of that, the comments I got from my last sound piece were mostly to use more processes that one would use when creating sound pieces like reverb, distortion, delay, et cetera, so I have to find good ways of improving on those things that I was lacking in my last assessment.
While the dictation of my voice plays a big role in setting that tone, the sound design, in this case, helps inform that, especially in the second act. The piece has a certain level of nuance and I also want to reflect that in the sound design, well at least I want to be subtle with it.
This blog post is mostly focusing on sound and noise, and how I want to use these two things to inform the atmosphere I’m trying to create.
For act one, I want the sound design to be quite crisp, I want the scene to sound like an exhibition space in UAL. So in terms of sound design, this means, reverb and echo on the voice, the shuffling of feet, the creaking of chairs, and also points where you can tell that the main character isn’t necessarily facing the microphone. All of this is to sell the fact that it is based in the reality we live in so it is something that is being recorded, something I touched upon in the last assessment as well. This section won’t have noise in it, the only way I can think of using it is to connect the first section with the 2nd.
Act 2 will be quite different. It’s meant to be set in the place that the protagonist speaking about, so outside, at night, on a walk. All I’m trying to do is sell that the protagonist is where he is so there isn’t much in terms of sound design here, at least nothing apart from the obvious. The noise aspect; however, will be more apparent, slowly rising in volume through the piece as the lines start to blur between reality and dreams, the mental dissonance starts to set in and the protagonist slowly descends into his fantasy.
There are parts in the script where I pause and in those moments I want the noise to also stop, as instead of a noise overload where is almost like the main character is going crazy, I’d rather pause in insanity something that hints to the listener that the main character knows this isn’t real but also to add emotion, to let the listener stop listening and instead empathising or feeling.
At the very last line, I want the sound design of the voice to basically morph between him being outside to him being in that exhibition space being interviewed.
The way I want to achieve this is by hiring out a recorder from uni and getting my own samples, but fortunately, I have a lot of samples from the previous project I can use so that is a nice thing to fall back on but I hope that I won’t have to.