Soundscape 1

As far as my intentions go, I don't know if I can state them clearer than my proposal, so... "I won't explain the genesis of this idea, because it makes me sound rather stupid. So instead I'll just jump right in- I want my project to try to convey the feeling of vertical movement, from a windy rooftop, through a city street/wilderness location (depending on which would be more interesting), and descending into the sewers/a cave (depending on which would be more interesting). I know of a few caves, and sewers frighten the bejeezus out of me, so that might be the deciding factor. The reason I think this would be interesting is simply the variety of sound I'd get on such a trek- I think I'll get all ranges of high-low range sounds, etc. Going from a wide open space to an enclosed one will also provide the listener with a tangible experience (well, not tangible, but SEEMINGLY so), and immerse them in the soundscape more than others might. "

Did I succeed? Kind of. There were a lot of technical hurdles in the way of getting this idea to work, and also a lot of workflow related ones that I was not smart enough to overcome entirely. The one thing I am happy with is the quality of (some of) the recordings, of which what I used in the actual project represents about a third. There's also some weird noises at the end which may or may not work, but I thought were entertaining and so I put them in. The final judgment, of course, remains in your court.

I'm not really sure what it is about envelope based pitch editing in sound programs that seems to be so hard. Analog based editing has been able to do it successfully for years, but in each of the three or four programs (three: Sound Forge, Fruity Loops (kinda), and a really unintuitive way inside Audacity ) I tried, it seemed to think that my perfectly smooth negative 5 pitch envelope was actually me requesting it to Do-Re-Mi it in a staircase pattern all the way down, making it sound like I'd recorded the audio while standing directly next to a blender and then tried to get the blender sound out through wishful thinking.

I eventually solved it by going back to Audacity and throwing in a time layer, which adjusts pitch (perfectly smoothly) as it stretches or compresses the 4th dimension, which is a little less adjustable than I'd like (you can't have a separate time layer for each track, you need to do it over the entire project), but at least it made it quasi-doable.

I don't say any of this by way of excuse, of course. The project is what it is and even though I'm not especially pleased with the result I don't expect blaming Sony for my troubles is going to do any good. I just like writing on blogposts instead of just putting sound files and images. (Speaking of images, Fig A is the map I drew out for this project while brainstorming, as a little extra bonus that I didn't really end up following at all)

EDIT: Never mind, my scanner's broken. I might try to put up Fig A tomorrow. Fig B is up, anyway, the snapshot of (part of) my workspace.

SOUNDSCAPE