Making a Soundscape! (Sound Project)

Hi guys it's me Santi,

I just completed my sound project, in which I had to create a convincing soundscape, about a minute in length, using various sounds found online and 4 sounds made using foley.

Before the sound project itself, we learned how foley was made in professional movies, with big studios filled with random items that foley artists can use to create sound effects. 

Me and my partner, Maiya, were then assigned to create a soundscape of our choosing using at least 4 sounds created using Foley. We could not have video of any form, just audio. And we could only have up to 7 words of dialogue in total.

Brainstorming

A section of our outline.

We thought of places or events that make a lot of sound, such as airports, races, fireworks shows, etc. But we eventually landed on a house flooding (Not the best timing since right after we submitted the project Hurricane Milton brought a lot of storms to our city 😅).

We split the story into four parts:

1. - Watching Television

2. - Flooding

3. - Escaping the Water

4. - Calling for Help

We designed each part to have a lot of sounds, such as the sound of incoherent news from the television, or footsteps and heavy breathing during the escape from the flooding water.

We submitted this idea and got to work on creating our soundscape.

Creating the Soundscape

The timeline of the soundscape in Adobe Audition

We used Adobe Audition to create this project. In total, we used 10 audio tracks to create our soundscape. Most sounds were brought from the platforms Epidemic Sound and Free Sound. For our Foley sounds, we decided to create sounds that resemble:

• A door closing
• A light switch being flicked on
• Chips crunching
  
• Small household objects rattling

We used creative objects to simulate these sounds. For example, for the sound of chips crunching, I used the sound of eggs cracking. To simulate the sound of a door closing, Maiya used a hanging shelf and tilted it so it makes two separate sounds.

Our biggest challenge was finding sounds that simulated the sound of water rushing in, which was hard to do because most sounds we found didn't sound like huge amounts of water going through the window of the house, but rather small streams of water. To fix this, we layered multiple sound effects of water running and mixed them with rainfall sounds. To mask the sound of water running further, we utilized the sound effect of wind howling throughout the soundscape.

We also used Audition's ability to "move" the loudness of a sound effect to either the right or left channels to make the soundscape more immersive. For example, the sound of the window breaking sounds louder from the left channel, and the water-rushing sound effect moves from the left to the right channel as it flows throughout the house.

While I think we did many things well, like the ones shown above, in the future I would create a more clear story, as I feel like to someone who's listening to the soundscape for the first time might need to listen to it again to understand what's actually going on.

Here's a look at the finalized project

Until next time, Santi :)