For the Audio Project, Elza and I created a sound piece that we named “Four”. Our project is mini horror story, where a man who comes home is mysteriously overcome by an entity in his house. The objective of the piece is to get you a teeny bit scared, and to give you the “AHA” moment when you realise what is actually happening.
The story that we came up with was an extrapolation of a story that I’d heard before. We’ve altered the details and the setting, but our sound piece essentially draws from this one story that a friend had told me a long time ago. We first listed out the various things that would be necessary to create this piece. We made a document of the individual elements that we’d include and then brainstormed over where we could source the different audios. After getting the green signal on the project idea, we split up the tasks. I dived into the web to collect different sounds and Elza took care of recording a friend’s voice for the protagonist and her roommate's voice for the mysterious entity.
We then had the task of putting things together to create the final audio as well as creating a website for it to live on. In our discussion, we realised that I had more experience doing Web Design and Elza had more experience working with Video/Audio. If I did the website and she did the audio, then neither of us would learn as much as we could if we did it the other way. So I worked on compiling the audio, and Elza was responsible for the website. I used audacity to create the entire sound piece. The various effects that it lets you play with took a while to understand but I was able to use the ones I needed to create what I wanted. We worked together so that we could help each other when needed and also get feedback at different points.
A particular point that I want to emphasize in my documentation is the title of the project and how we went about choosing it. Initially, Elza had put “The doll story” as the title as a placeholder. We discussed then of how we should choose a title. I advocated for a very vague title from the very beginning. We went over some titles such as “night”, “room”, etc., but none of them were hitting the mark. I then suggested the title “Three”, and when we almost decided to keep that, we changed our minds to keep the title “four” instead. I wanted users to read the title and then be perplexed about what it means. While they listen to the audio, most don’t realise that three turns into four after the man is overcome. When they do hear the mysterious entity chanting four, it hits them to enhance the “AHA” moment that I was going for. I’m not sure to what extent this worked out - it is something I will only find out with more feedback.
I am happy with the audio we created. I do realise that there could be a lot of places where certain things could be done to make it “smoother” - but I neither possessed the technical knowledge nor the time to make these things happen. When I asked a couple of friends to hear the audio, most of them gave a positive response. They were all able to identify the plot and the feel I was going for and most even reported being “freaked out”. That’s a big positive to me. In terms of the website, I find it really well designed. Elza did a wonderful job at the animation of the title which glows in pulses. The overall layout is also something that I really like - it contains only the things that we need it to, and no extra fluff.
It was a great experience compiling this sound piece. I’ve pushed myself and learned a lot of new stuff about audio editing and how it works.