Learning with Sound

  This year, I have already learned so much about the media sphere. But, for the last weeks I have learned more through sound. I have learned various strategies and ways media artists use to create sound. For example, the uses of synchronous or asynchronous sound used in creating soundscapes, the collection of all of the sounds presented in a scene. For the past few weeks, we have had two projects with dealing with sound in which we had to create two distinct soundscapes.

 The first of the two projects had me and my partner, Marcella create a soundscape from scratch. The soundscape had to be at least 1 minute in length, but could not be more than 2 minutes. No video was allowed, but, 7 words of dialogoue was permitted, which we used to our advantage. 4 of the sounds in the soundscape had to be created through a foley stage. The aim of this project was to create a soundscape through the use of layering in an editing software.

 To start with this project, we created a brainstorming sheet consisted of all of our ideas and sounds we wanted to use during the project. Immediately we came up with an idea of a tornado. Originally, we wanted to create a soundscape of someone rushing into a home, gathering supplies, and finding shelter, before getting swept up by the tornado. But, we realized that during the last part of the soundscape, there weren't many opportunities to layer sound, so the idea was scrapped. Fortunately for us, coming up with another idea was simple. Our next idea consisted of a tornado chaser trying to take pictures of the tornado, but ends up being killed by it, which we ran with. The 4 sounds that we created ourselves were stomping of feet on the grass, keys jingling, a man screaming, and a car door slamming. I edited the video, while my partner edited the foley video, which recorded our procedure while making the foley sounds. The link to the project is down below.

DierkingOliveros_soundscape_per4

 The second project had me and my partner from the one word film project return to that film to add a soundscape to that project. Members of the project had to work together to create a list of sounds used in the project. The project with the soundscape had to be created by each member, so there would be two different variations in the film since the original project consisted of 2 members.

 To start, my partner and I came up with a list of sounds from our original project. The one word film took place in a school setting, so we knew that we needed to have the film be surrounded with people talking, mimicking the setting of a school, throughout the video. Other sounds that were needed to be included was the chugging of water, throwing up sounds, plastic rustling, and more. Once we created a list of sounds, we then went on to create our different soundscapes. The link to the film with the soundscape is in the link below.

OWFSound_Dierking

 The use of sound is extremely important to create a quality piece of media. Originally, our One Word Film Project was extremely empty and souless, but, once we added sound, it started to feel like a cohesive piece. Throughout my experience learning sound, I have realized its importance in media.