Sound Design Tools (WEEK 2)

Reflective Blog: Insights from Sound Design

    Studying sound design has revealed its vital role in storytelling and media. I learned how sound effects, atmospheric sounds, and Foley sounds enhance emotions and immersion in films, games, and ads. The “less is more” principle taught me to use fewer, intentional sounds for impact. Techniques like layering, time stretching, and bit shifting, as used in DAWs, opened up creative ways to craft unique audio, like designing fast-paced game effects. I’m inspired to experiment with sound design in personal projects and appreciate its real-world applications. Though mastering DAWs will be challenging, I’m excited to explore further.

Exercise 1

    This exercise requires us to use the rack effect processor in Adobe Audition to adjust the audio equalizer, simulating the sound of a telephone.

Telephone Simulation Effect

    I boosted the mid frequencies and lowered the low and high frequencies to simulate the "voice-enhanced" effect typical of a telephone.

    Then, I fine-tuned the low frequencies to allow some background noise to be audible, and slightly raised the high frequencies to make the vocals stand out more and achieve a balance with the mid frequencies.

    Additionally, I incorporated flanger and reverb reduction effects to make the simulation more realistic. The final effect is as follows:

（Extra Extension）

    I created a simulated radio voice for a cyberpunk world by using the same equalizer adjustments as in Exercise 1, modifying the flanger effect to mimic the cold, robotic voice typical of a cyberpunk setting. I replaced the reverb reduction effect with an indoor reverb effect to simulate the ethereal environmental ambiance. The final effect is as follows:

CyberpunkBroadcast

    I learned how sound design enhances storytelling using techniques like equalization, flanging, and reverb in Adobe Audition to create telephone and cyberpunk audio effects. Embedding audio in Blogger via Google Drive’s <iframe> taught me about platform compatibility and troubleshooting playback issues.