VSP: Project 1

11.04.22 - 07.06.22 (Week 3 - Week 11)
Chai Yi Xuan / 0346645 / B' Creative Media
Video & Sound Production
Project 1 / Sound Designing

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LECTURES

Week 3 (Film Sound)

The mixing of sound elements below creates an audio setting that supports the action and engages the spectators:

• Speech
• Speech is one of the most important tools for understanding the story of the film. Speech can be from dialogue or voice over.
  
• Sound effect
• Usually composes of ambience and hard/'cut' audios.
  
• Ambience refers to the background noise present at a given scene or location.
• Hard/'Cut' audios refer to the audio and noises there are not speech or ambience (e.g. doors opening/closing, footsteps, train moving on tracks).
  
• Music
• Music in movie is to enhance the dramatic narrative and the emotional impact.

Dubbing, or Automated Dialog Replacement (ADR), is the process of re-recording dialogue after the filming process to improve audio quality or reflect dialogue changes.

Week 9 (Audio Editing)

Frequency Range

• Hertz(Hz) is a unit of frequency. A human can hear frequency range from about 20Hz to 20,000Hz. There are 7 subsets of frequencies used to help define the Ranges.

Dynamic Range

• Decibels (dB): The threshold of human hearing is measured as 0dB SPL (sound pressure level) and the threshold of pain 130dB SPL.

Space

• Mono v.s Stereo
• Mono sounds are recorded using single audio channel, while stereo sounds are recorded using two audio channels.

Week 11 (Sound Design)

4 important sound design techniques:

1. Time stretching/ compression

• Time Stretching/ compression changes the length of audio without altering its pitch.

2. Pitch Shifting

• Process of adjusting the pitch of an audio signal upwards or downwards, for both corrective (getting a vocal perfectly in tune, for example) and purely creative (changing the character of a drum loop, say) purposes.

3. Reversing

• The end of the audio will be heard first and the beginning last. Reverse audio changes the whole feeling and rhythm of the sound.

4. Layering

• Arranging several separate sounds together, in such a way the overall effect is of a single complete sound.

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INSTRUCTIONS

To-Do List:

• Find sound effects and sync with voice audio into a short clip from the Pixar movie Soul
  
• Using one audio clip, create 5 different effects in Adobe Audition
  
• Manipulate and distort three given audios into a new sound
  

Exercise 1 (Audio Dubbing)

We were given a short clip from the movie Soul and a script for the dialogue. I recorded my own voice and search up sound effects from ZapSplat. Then, I opened up all the files and edited them in Premiere Pro.

Figure 1: Audio dubbing exervise

Exercise 2 (Sound Shaping)

After getting the audio clip, I took it to Adobe Audition to reshape it. We were told to reshape it into 5 different settings— phone call, inside a closet, in a toilet, stadium and an underground cave.

I messed around with the parametric equalizer to get the effect for the phone call and being muffled, while I played with the reverb settings for the toilet, stadium and underground cave effect.

Final Outcome: Link

Exercise 3 (Sound Design)

For this exercise, we were told to redesign the sounds given, which were explosion, punch, and voice.

I started shaping the noise for explosion. I tweaked the reverb and added a subtle echo effect, to make it a little bit more dramatic.

We were to design three different sounding punches, and I had more fun with this part. I start off easy by lowering the pitch for the first punch. Then, I made the second one fast and higher pitched. I did the same thing as the first punch for the last, but I added the echo and reverb effect to dramatize. I liked how it turned out since it sounded like a K.O. punch.

Redesigning the voice is a little bit tricky, since we had to change it entirely to a monster voice. The basic move was to lower the pitch. After that, I played around with the reverb and distortion in hopes of making the voice less like a human. While fooling around, I added a little bit of echo to it. In the end, my audio sounded cool, and I submitted that along with my other tweaked audios.

Final Outcome: Link

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REFLECTIONS

While Exercise 1 was a fairly easy task, the same can't be said for the other exercises (for me at least). I have no idea how to use Adobe Audition. I had to play around with a bunch of settings to get use to it. I mostly depended on my intuition and my minimal knowledge on terminology in Adobe Audition to finish the sound shaping and design exercises. Despite the struggle to pick up on a new program, I had fun playing around with effects and achieving different things with it. Outside of this assignment, I might take some time to play around and see what I can create out of it.