Documentation for Sound Project

Project Description

The sound project, A Journey of Emotions Through Melody consists of three pieces of stories, which use the same melody but address different emotions. The project was inspired by an American song, Dreaming of Home and Mother. This song also has the Chinese and Japanese version, but all three versions have the same melody, yet the emotions that they convey are different: The American version expresses the feeling of missing childhood, the Chinese version depicts the scene of farewell and addresses the sadness of saying goodbye, and the Japanese version addresses the feeling of missing home when people are away from home.

Intuitively, these different emotions are conveyed by the lyrics, however, even without the lyrics, the melody can be used in different scenarios and perfectly address different feelings. One example is a Chinese film Memories of Old Beijing (1983), in which it used the Chinese version of the Dreaming of Home and Mother for six times. There are three times that I remember the most: the first time was in a graduation ceremony, and the main character, Ying Zi, was a little kid. She didn't know the purpose of playing this song, and just looked around, even wandered around in the auditorium, feeling bored. The second time was when Ying Zi left with her father, after her thief friend misunderstood Ying Zi for reporting him. She was sad of losing a friend. The third time was at the end of the film, when Ying Zi's father passed away, Ying Zi buried her father, and left with her family. She felt sorrowful of losing her father, and this song also symbolizes that Ying Zi was matured and "she was not child anymore" (Farewell to her childhood).

In Memories of Old Beijing, despite the feelings that the song addresses different feelings in different scenes, they are all aligned with the theme of the song: Farewell. However, my partner and I think that this melody can address different themes of feelings. Therefore, we did this project to show that the feelings in the three versions of the song can be conveyed to the listener by the melody solely. We hope that by listening to three scenarios that tell three different stories and incorporate the same melody, the listeners can get the meaning that each audio clip conveys, and think about what scenario and feeling do they come into mind when hearing this melody.

Process

At first, I thought of putting the three scenarios into one audio clip. There are many films that use several chapters to form the whole film. Each chapter doesn't have significant relationship, and the main purpose of doing this is to enhance the emotion that the film addresses. In addition, in several pieces especially the classical melodies, the main theme music was played by several times, and each one is different than others. Another reason for doing in this way is that I wanted to put the pure melody after displaying the third scenario, and ask (by using the picture on the screen) the listener, what's their interpretation of the song after hearing the previous three scenarios. This can be considered as a "journey" to listen to other people's stories, and think about the their own stories. However, I finally was persuaded by my partner and my Professor, to put the three scenarios on the page and provide the listeners the opportunity to choose and listen. The reason is that the link and the order of the scenarios aren't strong enough to guide the listeners to the right direction of the journey. After I finished recording and editing the pieces, I found that our work can address the feeling and move the listeners pretty well. Perhaps we don't need to combine the audio clips to enhance the feeling, as the single clip can already serve the function.

Another important thing that we need to consider is how to tell the story. When we were writing the script, we tried to vary the format of conveying the story. Therefore, we put the first one into the radio setting, as the caller narrates her experiences after hearing the melody; we wrote the second one as the direct one, which tells the story in the graduation party. I intended to make the third one as the documentary one. The voice-over narrates the daily life of an overseas white-collar worker, and describes his feeling of missing the native dishes and home. There's a renowned Chinese documentary called A Bite of China, in which the voice-over narrates the process of making the native dish and the stories of the cooks' with their hometowns. The feeling of missing the hometown's food and being moved by the cooks was enhanced by the story itself through the calm voice-over, as well as the delicious look of the food. However, I later revised the idea a little because since our project is more like a "fast-food": we need to tell the listeners what feelings that we want to address clearly in only one-minute, and we cannot achieve this goal via approach. Therefore, we made the third scenario as the voice-over who has full emotions, telling the story of a white collar.

Work division: Wahib wrote the introduction and wrote the script and edited the piece for the first scenario, and I wrote the scripts and edited the piece for the second and third scenarios. We did the recording together, and Wahib did the javascript for the webpage. I took the task of positioning for the webpage.

Sound editing: I recorded my footstep in scenario 3, but I found that the noises are loud (I used the Audacity to reduce the noisce later), so I mostly downloaded the sound effect online. The main problem for this was the sounds online were recorded in different places, some were recorded in a small space, while some were in a large room. Combining them and convincing the listeners that this happened in the same setting was a hard task. I tried to use the Equalization and Reverb through trial-and-error, and I hope the result is good. One thing for the Equalization is that it is way more difficult than I thought after watching Professor Matteo adjusting it. The sound became really buzzing if I eliminated all the sound of which the frequency was bigger than 40Hz. I later experimented out the "party-like" music as well as the leaking sound through the wall (in second scenario, and I used Asher Book's Here with You as the party song), and I hope that the listeners can imagine the scene that the main character walked outside of the party, and opened her phone to listen to the melody.

Reflection/Evaluation

It was a really nice experience this time (Actually, it's always the case).I did the critique a lot from beginning to the end. Our initial idea concentrated on "lyrics", as we wanted to use different sounds (e.g. birds chirping, friends saying goodbye, etc) to tell the listeners what the song (the lyrics) is about, and made it as a new enire piece. Later we deepend our idea, and thought about the emotions of a song regardless of the lyrics. Can different people feel differently after hearing the same melody? Absolutely yes. One of the Chinese Music Apps, NetEase Music utilizes this as their marketing strategy. The distinctive characteristic of the app compared to other competitors is that the comments under the song are well-written. Many people share their personal experiences that they are remind of after hearing the song. I really like the sound pieces that we recorded and edited. This task makes me believe that it is possible to tell a story in one minute with sufficient emotions and clear plot. Lastly, though our web page is a little plain and we might need to think more about the design (for example, why the background of the scenePage is black? Is it necessary or just our preferences?), we did a good job on the buttons that play music. Critiquing the buttons and the logic behind is also a nice perience. For example, we need to think about whether the listeners could go back to the scene page if they didn't finish listening the clip, how to position the buttons, and whether the buttons need to disappear after clicking. Overall, I learned a lot in this project, and I really enjoyed it.