Project 4 - Audio
For my Project 4 Augmented Reality game, i had planned on making a marching band which players could control by placing down cards which would summon particular models and instrument sounds into the game. Once the final card (a conductor) had been placed the band would start playing and be controlled by an on screen joystick marching across the players objects such as a table. As I don't currently have anyone available to collaborate in regards to Audio i decided to make placeholder audio myself with only my voice.
In the above audio player you can hear the second track was supposed to be a base drum.I started out with a classic bom bom bom bom sound and put it through some filters in Audacity. Firstly i used Noise Reduction to filter out any of the background noise my microphone picked up while recording in my room. This drastically quieted the entire file so afterwards i used a compressor. I set the threshold and release times to median levels and lowered the other sliders, this raised the volume of the track while keeping the lack of background noises.
The only other major aspect i changed to the bass line other than topping and tailing it was adding echo. Setting the delay time to just 1 second and lowered the decay rate down to 0.2, this gave the effect of actually sounding like multiple bass drums were being played simultaneously which fits the game as a marching band stereotypically has more than one.
The next instrument i worked on was the triangle, i went for an up tempo ting ta ta ting track with my voice and same as the bass drum brought it into Audacity. After again topping and tailing the track to remove my starting and ending breathing sounds i again used noise reduction to clear the background of the track. As my voice isn’t as high pitched as a triangle the first effect i then added was a pitch change. The only thing under pitch that i changed was the frequency and raised its percent change up to around 90%. This definitely changed the sound and took it in a different direction than i expected. Raising it higher than 90% made it very squeaky and still very much obviously a voice, whereas at 90% it still kept some lower tones from my voice, i was really liking the sound of it but it didn’t sound like a triangle at all. The more i messed with the effects the more i felt that it actually was starting to sound like a snare drum, so i decided to run with that and see what i could make. I added some distortion to the triangle track and after compressing it as well i was really happy with the way it sounded. Absolutely nothing like a triangle but it was an upbeat snare drum sound not exactly like hitting the skin of the drum but hitting the metal edges which is common practice in a marching band drum line.
Although i still have many instruments to go i'll continue to use the same process and effects which i have used so far, and hopefully before my prototype is complete i can get an Audio collaborator to help me create a far more polished auditory experience, as the game really focus’ around music it's one of my highest priorities for the final product.
