Sound Walk: A Purposeful DripDripDripDripDripDripDripDripDripDripDripDripDrip.
I made this with Francisco and Tatiana (Tash). We began by trying to come up with a theme. Francisco suggested we don't take "sound walk" literally, therefore we needed an element that has many forms in which may produce many sounds. "The walk" for us is more like the idea of progressing or transforming. I suggested we try playing with various shapes of glass, fill them with water and listen to the sound they make when we hit them. Because we wanted to focus just these two elements - glass and water, we needed to eliminate the ambient sound as much as possible. We decided to record them in a quiet place, Francisco's basement.
During the recording session, we spent some time figuring out the operation of the zoom recorder, and then we spent some time practicing using the directional mic. More importantly, thanks to Francisco, we knew to label our recordings by verbally noting it in the beginning of every file. The actual sound of the glass didn't really meet my expectation - I was imaging a much more musical tone. And I quickly found out the shape of the glass matters a lot. Wine glass can make a 'round' sound that echoes, whereas mason jars make a 'rigid' sound that is short and muted. I found myself mesmerize by the different sound qualities, and focused only on the technicality of making sound and recording it. I actually forgot about the theme.
Before editing, we regrouped to think about how to adhere to the theme with our recording samples. We felt like the story line can be that the nature is slowly taken over by machines, but the nature persists, comes back and finds a balance to co-exist with the machines. We divided the tasks into three - (1) Nature - clean up the sound samples and find a set of glass "notes". (2) Machines' entrance - add effects and make arrangements with the clean sound. (3) Explosion and balance - go crazy with the effects, and create a denouement with both natural and mechanic sound. I was in charged of the second part. I copied a part of the clean sound to a separate track and added effect, and copied another part of the clean sound to the next track, with some of the same effect from before, and added more - I repeated this process until I had 6 more tracks layered partially with each other. And I cleaned up the transitions, balanced the amplitude, added compressions to make sure there was no peaks.
When the third part was completed by Tash, we found the soundtrack had potential to be much more full. It was also not long enough. Francisco then made a final editing. He added a lot more effects and layers to it. I feel he has a slightly different interpretation to our theme. But that's fine, the important thing is I feel like I know my teammates a little more now. I am surprised by the depth this piece ended up. This collaboration exceeded my expectation. I had a lot of fun.