Create A Soundscape
A Soundscape is an ‘acoustic environment’. It’s one or more sounds that forms a perceived environment. In digital media and media production, we don’t often create soundscapes as an explicit end-goal, but use them with and around other elements. Like establishing setting or mood in a podcast, supporting a setting in a film, or helping construct the atmosphere and emotion of a video game level.
Choose an image – photograph, illustration, painting, whatever. You can pick anything except a screenshot of a movie or TV show, because somebody already made a soundscape for that.
Source audio from at least four sources. Assemble and edit them into one audio file that when listened to, gives you some sense of the image as a location or setting.
Goodnight getting into audio localization or directionality too much. It's not about selling space with this sound for this project but picking audio files and editing them so they go together to help tell a story. Or just the establishing shot to a story. Start by picking or imagining a location, and then brainstorming all of the sounds that you might find there. This location could be a real-life location drawn from your memories or something completely fantastical, imaginary, or invented. If it helps, you can think of this as doing sound design work for a movie … we just don't have the movie.
Submit your exported audio file, image, and a document with all attribution and a few sentences for some context about what you were aiming for.
Requirements
- Inspiration Image
- At least four sourced audio files
- They do not need to be ‘diagetic’. Music/VO is okay.
- They do not need to be recorded.
- You must have the rights to use them. (Public Domain, CC0, or with-attribution).
- At least two must overlap in some way.
- Your final soundscape must be at least 15 seconds long and no longer than 60 seconds.
- 1 audio source, at most, can be spoken voice.
- Examples:
- Like… most podcasts?
- See ‘in-class’ section of Moodle
- Don’t download viruses. Use your best judgement when sourcing files from the web, and stick to trusted sources.
Submission
- Audio file in .wav or .mp3 (don’t upload your audacity project .aup file)
- Your inspiration image
- Text file with all attributions, your name, and a brief description of what you were going for and how well you think you did. (TOC: Attribution, Objective, Reflection)
Audio Resources
- https://impr.hdyar.com/resources/assets.html#sound-effects
- https://freesound.org/
- https://archive.org/
- https://archive.org/details/opensource_audio