HW2 - Radioplay
Brian Gurewitz
10/29/13
Binaural Stereo File:
Four Individual Wave Files:
4channelPlayer:
Binaural4:
binauralSlates:
Explanation of project:
(NOTE: Listen first to see if you can interpret it without reading... I'm curious...)
This radioplay consists of a man calling his ex-girlfriend on the phone while he is re-living the memory of their first meeting, beside a waterfall. The man exits his car, calls her, and walks down a path toward the waterfall, which comes up on his left. We discover that their breakup was due to a unfortunate difference in career needs. They still have warm feelings towards each other, though they had agreed not to talk.
I used panning to try to convey a sense of location for sound effects around the man's head. The sound effects used include:
Car engine (in all four channels)
Car door opening and closing (pans from left to right channels as if he were getting out of the car – this effect still moves too rapidly and is not quite convincing enough)
Ambient forest and footstep sounds (in all four channels, biased slightly to the left – this sound is not perfect by any means, mostly because it required taking a stereo file, converting it to mono, and playing it in all four channels. So a bird chirp sounds like it comes from every direction. However, I avoided the complication of trying to micromanage each and every sound in the recorded sample I used)
iPhone unlocking (in front channels)
iPhone ring (Right channels)
Man's voice (all four channels, biased toward front)
Woman's voice (Right channels at first, as if he were holding the phone up to his ear, but then in the front channels when the man switches to “Facetime” on his phone)
Waterfall (in left channels at first, but switching to Front channels when the man uses “Facetime” to show the waterfall to the woman
Because the scene is outdoors, I didn't use any reverb for enclosed spaces.
I recorded both voices myself and edited them into a conversation. For the woman's voice, I raised the pitch slightly to help my acting. I also experimented with some bandpass and other effects to try to make her voice sound more like it was coming from a telephone. When those attempts generally failed, I simply recorded a voice memo on my phone and then re-recorded that voice memo into the microphone in the studio (so it is actually coming from a phone).