Communications lab Sound Story project ! By Yeva, Jannah and Daeun!
Project Name: New Year’s in New York Project Description: The genre of our project is an audio story, which combines original sound with music and everyday sounds to create a narrative. The story is about friends, Jannah and Yeva, who live in Abu Dhabi and decide to celebrate the new year’s year in New York, watching the ball drop in Times Square. However, getting to NY is not that easy - they have to stop in Paris and learn that there are extreme weather conditions. Will they be able to make it to Times Square before the clock strikes 12? To find out the answer to this question, you should listen to our audio story! When talking about the concept and theme, we wanted our story to be engaging and at the same time intriguing, that is why we added the unexpected problem at the end of the story. By infusing the audio with real-life sounds like crowd ambiance, sound of the cars on road, airport announcements, we tried to make the listener feel as if he is also a character of the story. We were also inspired by the hometown soundscapes done in class and created our own soundscape for Paris!
Process:
- Planning process
We started from creating a bullet-point outline of the story by listing the sequence of events that will happen. After that, we brainstormed on what the conflict of the story could be. From that point on, we started writing a detailed script with the phrases of each character and divided it into scenes depending on the location of the characters. With a clear picture of the outline in mind, we created a list of additional sounds that should be downloaded from a sound library.
- Recording
The next step was audio recording, where we set up the equipment, made some test recordings, adjusted the settings, and started capturing the dialogues. We used audio recording devices borrowed from the Equipment Lab.
- Editing
The first step of the editing process is finding and downloading the sound from the sound library that we will need to make our story more realistic. Then we listened to our own sound recording to choose the best ones. After that, we transferred all the audio files to Audacity, arranged them in layers, cut the unnecessary parts, and applied effects to the sounds to improve the quality of sound and achieve a more engaging sound.
- Web Development
We brainstormed a wireframe that reflects the storyline of our recording. Since it is about two vloggers taking a trip from Abu Dhabi to Paris and then to New York, we decided to showcase these three cities on the website and embed corresponding sounds to each city. To include an interactive element, we enabled the user to click each city and listen to the audio. Since our audio was going to be separated into three different parts, we decided that having a scroll option on our website was going to aid in the story flow.
Reflection/Evaluation: As we planned for the project, we modified our ideas a few times in order to include various sounds and to push ourselves creatively. After such trials, we managed to come up with a satisfactory storyline, and we went on to collecting/recording necessary audio. Our expectations were met in the sense that we created a short yet dynamic story with interesting supporting sounds. We are also proud of the website that reflects the audio