Soundscape | Unearth

This is a little unusual compared to most things I post. I'm taking a Sound Design class this semester and one of our first big projects was to make a soundscape. I am even more intrigued by sound design than I was before, especially since this is my first foray into the audio world. The idea I pitched was to have an explorer walking down a cave or tunnel and then waking up an ancient mechanical being. I thought I was being a little too ambitious considering my lack of knowledge and class load, but I wanted to try to do something that was organic, mechanical, and ethereal. I'm actually pretty happy with out this turned out for a first attempt at sound design.

I recorded everything you heard by hand using a field recorder and a studio mic for the singing portion. I even played bongo drums for the background beat. Then I mixed it all together in Pro Tools 11 (audio editing software). Recording some of the natural stuff was fairly straight forward, like dropping rocks in a tunnel, or recording a bubbly stream. But the robot noises were a little more difficult. I recorded things like a little r/c quadcopter, an Xbox360 disc drive opening and closing, aerosol cans for hissing noises, and screwdrivers scraping along metal. For the main transition noise before the robot shows up I recorded my fingernail running along a guitar string. I also capture the noise of a heavy metal washer spinning down onto the top of a bongo drum. When I went out into the woods, I found a dead log and thick dead stick. I hit the stick on the log and I ended up using those noises to help fill in the drum beats and make them more organic. So I just recorded a bunch of cool sounding noises, then patched them together in the mix.

I hope you enjoyed listening to it as much as I had fun making it!

My friend Seth Weedin made the visualizer for me, you can check out the work soundscape and music he makes on his Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/breaklinemusic