The Process of Healing.
About.
This project delves into the tumultuous emotional landscape of a painful breakup and heartache. Through a memory soundscape, listeners are taken on a journey of emotions, experiencing the process of loss, grief, and ultimately, healing.
The Process
The rules under which this project was created:
A soundscape is a composition of sounds that create the sensation of experiencing a particular acoustic environment. Make a 1-minute soundscape that recreates a memory of a particular time, event, or space. Both the physical as well as emotional circumstances of the memory can be reflected in the soundscape. Think of all the sounds you may have heard in that particular memory. (Example: your first day of school. School buzzer, the rumble of the school bus engine, other children talking or laughing, bees buzzing around the garden shrubs on your walk to the bus stop, etc.) Do not recreate dialogue, but rather, think of all the non-verbal sounds associated with this memory. A listener should be able to recreate the scene or environment while listening to your soundscape composition. Do not use sound downloaded from the internet. Do not take the form of a song or a voice narration.
For my Memory Soundscape project, I’ve chosen to explore the tumultuous emotional landscape of a painful breakup and heartache. Throughout the memory soundscape, listeners are taken on a journey of emotions through the process of loss, grief, and finally, healing.
In the beginning of the audio, you are struck with the sound of a door opening and shutting, symbolizing a “being” or “thing” leaving your life. In this case, I imagined a loved one leaving me, whether it be a family member dying or a break-up with a partner. Almost immediately after their absence, you are struck with grief, which shows itself through the sounds of crying and the symbolism of rain. As the rain and the cries continue, you are then struck with the sound of a phone dialling and ringing. This sound was made to represent the denial stage we all feel when someone leaves your life, as you can hear continuous dialling and ringing, yet you are met with no one on the other side. As the calls become insistent with no reply, the cries grow louder and more desperate, just as the rain begins to grow louder. Finally, the last ring ends with a “line disconnected” sound, showcasing how there is really no getting that special person back in your life. At this point, peak emotion is felt, it is almost the realization stage, where everything has finally set in, you realize they are really gone, and you are fully encompassed with grief. As the rain and cries reach their climax, you begin to hear a rustling and a shushing, representing an external force that comes to your aid to care for you. In this case, I imagined my friends and family comforting me through grief and sadness after losing a loved one. As the shushing and stroking continue, both the rain and cries begin to die down. Eventually, after the last shush, a sigh of relief can be heard. The one going through grief has now been able to heal, accept reality and move on.
The story of the soundscape really goes through a journey with its listeners, having a clear beginning, middle, and end. My main intention was to give listeners a view into my inner workings, allowing them to see the process I go through when I encounter grief, and bear myself in showcasing how the memory of how I went through the process of healing when I lost a loved one.
Going into this project, I knew I wanted to once again touch on the topic of ‘Love.’ However, I was unsure of exactly what memory surrounding love I wanted to showcase. So far, I have only showcased the happy, joyful aspects of love. With this soundscape, I thought it may be more interesting to explore what love means without all the glitters and rainbows – what it means to lose love and how it feels. Once I started thinking in this frame of mind, it was a lot easier to think of memories I would be able to convey. As I wanted my piece to be a story, I didn’t think focusing only on one emotion in my memory would be very interesting, as it would make for a very one-dimensional story. Additionally, I see love as something that possesses a lot of different facets, dumbing it down to one emotion seemed way too oversimplified. With this frame of mind, I then decided to tell a story of a process, rather than just the sadness of loss in love.
Before beginning to record audio, I briefly brainstormed the types of sounds I would associate with my memory. What kind of sounds did I actually hear during this time? What kind of sounds were around me? What kind of sounds would work well as symbolism for emotions and feelings? After narrowing down the type of sounds I wanted to record, I started my process of recording.
During my process of recording audio, I did hit a few stumps, the first being creating the sound of rain. As any reasonable person would think, you want to recreate the sound of rain, then you just go to the shower and run some water, right? And you’re not wrong! In theory, that would have worked great. However, I didn’t take into account 1) the acoustics of our dorm bathroom and 2) just how noisy the piping and draining are when you’re in the shower! My shower recordings were filled with loud sounds of water gushing through the pipe and pouring down the drain and the actual sound of the water that I was trying to get was barely noticeable. When I tried to switch tactics and record the sound of the sink water, the same issue happened – the pipes were just too noisy! This definitely left me stuck, as I knew I really wanted rain sounds but just couldn’t figure out how to do it. After some brainstorming, I remembered something I had learned in a high school film class, about how in Old Hollywood many directors would use cooking sounds as sound effects for various different things. With a new idea in mind, I busted out some bacon and got to frying, and let me tell you, it worked so well! The sound of bacon frying on a pan really did sound similar to raindrops hitting the floor, and with that, I finally got my rain sound!
The next issue I came into was something I never really thought about before I started, the phone ringing sound. When I began to try and record the sound of a phone ringing, I came to realize that many numbers in China do not give off the traditional ring sound most are familiar with; instead, a cute song plays. And while I am a sucker for a cute song, the ring didn’t fit the vibe. I found myself calling almost every number I could get my hands on until finally, I found one that worked (which just so happened to be a public safety number hehe). I called the number about 3 times, recording as many rings as I could, and then was all set.
The recording of all other sounds was quite standard. As I have a bit of experience in audio manipulation and recording, everything technical went smoothly. When it came to editing, I knew I wanted to take a “less is more” approach. Since the memory and feelings within the memory were something so raw and vulnerable, I didn’t want to take away from the story too much by adding too many effects or sounds at a time. I mainly focused on aligning my audio in a way that clearly told a story, that allowed listeners to follow what was happening, without feeling overwhelmed and overstimulated. As I would like to think the quality of the sounds was pretty good, I tried to let the quality of the sounds take the lead and evoke emotions from listeners, such as the sounds of the cries or the franticness of the calling. I felt like the sounds alone, based on how I aligned them, spoke for themselves and were sounds of a story that everyone could relate to. For this reason, I opted for a cleaner, more “empty” approach to my soundscape.
Although I did have experience in audio editing and manipulation, I think I learned more about how to use effects and edit volume. Before, I felt like I wouldn’t really mess with volume editing of my tracks, as I thought, “Well if it’s too loud, just turn your computer volume down.” However, now I really get why it’s important. I can obviously always get better, but I feel like I have more of a solid grasp on using effects and how to edit volume levels of individual clips to ensure the overall sound is an acceptable volume.
I feel like I did learn quite a bit through this project, especially through the help of the feedback sheets we got. Although I really didn’t implement much panning in my final (which I wish I did), I did learn quite a bit about how to do it, when to do it, and the effect it has when you utilize panning. I never even thought about the effect much before as I never really worked with speakers and sound systems where the panning would be noticeable, and quite honestly, I never saw the point of it. However, after the feedback I got, I realized panning could be used in my soundscape quite well, whether that be through the crying panning over time, or panning the shooshing on one side and crying on another to showcase to listeners it is an outside source of comfort.
Overall, though, my soundscape was perceived well! Everyone seemed to have gotten the story – clearly being able to identify the beginning, middle, and end – and felt and related to the emotion in the soundscape. Most everyone could relate to my memory I showcased and appreciated how vulnerable the audio was. There were some mixed reviews on whether the audio was too simple or not – some claiming they appreciated the simplicity as it helped bring out the story in a genuine way, showcasing the emotion, while others claimed they wished they heard more variety of sound. I think those comments really just come down to preference, as some prefer “busy” sounds while others prefer more “vulnerable” sounds. I am proud of how it turned out, and I think all my intentions clearly shine through in this piece.