My soundscape for project #1 was a representation of being sick as a child. I hoped to capture the dizzy, restless feeling of having a high fever, as well as the confusing, ear-pressure-impacting annoyance of bad congestion.
That's right, the flu.
To capture this effect, I layered pillow noises, sheet rustling, and coughs. I used wild pans and delay effects on these sounds to help set the mood. As the piece goes on, a quiet knock on the door brings in the soothing voice of Mom. She turns on my favorite cartoon (Tom and Jerry) before pouring me a glass of Sprite ‚ warning me to sip it slowly, before leaving the room. At the time sipping Sprite made me feel better ‚ now it just reminds me of being sick.
The problems I faced while working on this project were mostly from my computer, which I used to record most of my sounds. Since upgrading my motherboard, my computer rejects my nice soundcard and will only let me use the crappy card on the board. Therefore I had to improvise and use my Web Camís mic to do the recording, which gave me mixed results. The next problem came in transferring my sounds to the actlab for editing. Upon opening my sounds in the lab, I found that a couple of them were corrupt. This left me with a very quiet door, no Tylenol, and no foot steps. I opted to leave the last two out. Overall, I'm fairly happy with my project, as it turned out very close to what I envisioned.