Project 1 - Audio Creation

Similarly to my 3D asset creation blog, i wrote at length about the process i too to creating the audio assets for Emotion in Motion. Again however i didn’t break down my motives behind my decisions to choose Richard Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries other than that it was what Kandinsky listened to when he painted.

I will quickly recap my process before explaining my motives:

First i chose Wagner’s piece as the Artist had a strong connection to his work.

I came up with an interesting way of using the Audio instead of just playing it as background music.

I planned to break up the orchestral piece into separate instruments and when you destroy a certain musical note (missile) it would add one of the other instruments into the piece for the length of the explosion.

Using MIDI editing software I separated the instruments from the base track but came to the realisation that the software didn’t provide a way to export the layers of the MIDI separately.

Therefore i decided to use OBS to record MP4 files of each instrument while all the others were muted and then used online conversion software to turn them into the preferred OGG file format.

Once that was completed I brought the OGG files into Audacity to complete top and tailing of the files and using Noise Reduction and Equalisation effects.

The reason i wanted to use Audio in a way other than just background music was to make the music a part of the creation process of the players recreation of Kandinsky’s Circle in a Circle. I chose this because when completing my research there was a large amount of evidence that pointed to Kandinsky having synaesthesia. This is defined as a sensation produced in one modality when a stimulus is applied to another modality, as when the hearing of a certain sound induces the visualization of a certain color. People believed Kandinsky could “See” sound as colours when he painted and i wanted the player to have a similar interaction with sound and colour throughout the game.