sonic measures

Bells on College Green – a Sound Design Project

This is the second of my two final projects for “Sonic Measures,” a Sound Design course I took this spring with Professor Terry Adkins and Marc Blumthal.

The assignment was to take some video footage which was primarily visual in nature (and natural – not a performance) and to use sound design to enhance the raw footage. In Logic, to enhance the audio already present from the video (which was full of ringing church bells which inspired the sound design,) I used raw waveforms generated in Audacity and used time, pitch, and layering effects and reverberation to create a soundscape full of sounds that are evocative of bells or otherwise mimic bells’ characteristics.

The video footage was taken on College Green at Penn, and between 36th & 34th Streets // between Locust Walk and Walnut Street over the course of several afternoons at around the same time, thus having clock bells tolling in all of my footage.

the Wading Bird – a Sound Design project

This is one of my two final projects for “Sonic Measures,” a Sound Design course I took this spring with Professor Terry Adkins and Marc Blumthal.
The assignment was to take some video footage which was primarily visual in nature (and natural – not a performance) and to use sound design to enhance the raw footage. In Logic, to enhance the audio already present from the video (which was very distorted,) I used percussion, foley water sounds, and other effects and reverberation to create a soundscape to highlight this bird, stalking prey along the shoreline.

The video footage was taken on my Droid cellphone in Sarasota, Florida.

New Project: Sound Editing and Mixing

For an assignment in Professor Terry Adkins’ Sonic Measures course at UPenn this spring, our first project was to choose an audio source, then to deconstruct and make something unrecognizable from it (so the end result is not obviously tied to or traceable to its original audio source). I chose Bobby McFerrin’s a cappella track that plays under the Pixar short film Knick Knack. We used Logic to use editing and mixing functions to create something entirely new by recycling and modifying our sound source. Mixing tools were used to enhance the environmental/other qualities of our projects.

My goal was to create a sound scape evocative of biking through a construction zone or busy city, like the Big Dig or Boston, MA more generally.

…Sonic Measures Project: “Knack Knick”…