My Soundscape
Final Major Project
I plan to use my YouTube channel quite a bit during this project so all the video I make will be on there.
To fully experience the audio of all the pieces in this project that have any sound, stereo headphones or speakers are required/suggested to use when listening.
And on a side note, this is a on-going project, so writing it all up is also on-going.
Pre-Project
Long before I thought of my idea for my final major project (FMP), I knew I wanted to do something sound-related, so I've been recording random things and situations since Christmas 2019 (this is not include the music I record).
These recordings have collated into 3 sound pieces that focus around compressing and isolating frequencies in sound recordings of situations unique to me and then layering and panning those different recordings (some of these recordings may contain copyrighted compositions, so credit to those composers for those compositions).
Sound Project Royal
Sound Project All I Want
Sound Project Dragon
The last piece is cut slightly short due to mp3 file size restrictions.
After exploring this idea of multiple narratives playing at the same time while being manipulated to limit the sound in certain frequencies, I felt like the idea was strong and interesting by itself while having a lot of room to change and grow over the FMP. Thus, this became the main inspiration for my FMP, or at least the start point for this journey.
The Project
Due to the coronavirus and how the course/life seemed to slow down after lockdown started, my drive to complete this project faded because I felt like I was hard to progress without a clear goal in (of which was the final show that was on the ropes for a long time).
Despite all of this, I have a bit of work that I did during that time as well as a blueprint on something I wanted to do but was restricted by my knowledge and hardware.
Embed is a playlist of the videos I made that are all meant to represent the unique and mundane experiences that I have experienced through mainly sound, but also sometimes with video as well.
What I think is interesting is the number of recordings that I've made on my phone for over half a year just for a chance to make to the pieces below. Capturing experiences by using my phone to record them without ruining the experience for myself was something I greatly enjoyed and look back on fondly. That enjoyment of small and random occurrences, as well as the appreciation of those around me that have created most of those experiences, was something I tried to capture in the videos I uploaded on youtube.
While that feeling may not come across easily or clearly, with those people who were included in any shape or form will be reminded these experiences, of which could be something like a learning experience for them in a strange way.
Memories are important to everyone, and I least with me I want to have to way to remember those memories through something like a memento, and usually, that's a photo or a video. After all this time recording my daily life, I've come to love using audio recordings as a way to remember, not just an experience, but who I was during that recording. All the things I was during those recordings, someone's counsel, a referee, heartbroken, emotionally raw, quietly happy and so much more that makes up who I am now. All I need to do to remember is plug in some headphones and lose myself.
That's the experience I've had this main part of my project.
The Spectrogram part
After making all these videos, I wanted to do something different, and something I've never seen before (but I doesn't doubt that it's been done before).
I've seen people make art using audio and spectrograms, which is just a type of visual representation of sound. Another idea I've had since the start of the project is to do something like this, so I played around with the idea.
One experiment led me to recreate my art as sound. I used a virtual synth that uses bitmaps and makes sounds based on them. I created a bitmap that was entirely comprised of previous art pieces I've done before, which resulted in this audio and visuals.
The Original Bitmap.
The Audio of the Bitmap.
The Spectrogram.
After this, I really wanted to test the limits but recreating a short film I did as a spectrogram and creating an animation of it by making an audio track with lots of keyframes and then speeding that up.
But hardware restrictions said otherwise.
The only way I can make a recording of a scrolling spectrogram is by screen-capping it, but my PC is just not powerful enough do it well and I have found 0 ways to conceivably turn an audio file into a scrolling spectrogram video, so I don't have a way to actually make it. Also the process I used to create the continuous spectrogram images is a very manual and tedious process that I still do not know how to streamline.
This problem caused me to reduce the number of frames from something like 16 frames per second to less than 8 just to make the time invested in making the 20 seconds worth spectrogram video bare-able. Making the frame rate low was also due to how I wanted my PC to be able to process such a big file size properly. so that there could be a chance that I could record the spectrogram.
Once I get the know-how, I was definitely follow-through fully with the idea.
