See Hear Part 1 - Recording, Editing & Manipulating

Team Indoors about to unleash pain upon a poor, unfortunate empty bottle for the greater good of sound recording. 

The task was to create our own 2-min sound design piece where each person of the group would produce 30 seconds of animation. Our year was divided into two groups: one that would source from outside their sounds to manipulate, the other group the same task but from indoors. I was a part of the indoor group. Our plan was to not think in terms of animation and purely focus on sound.

For recording, we decided to record anything that sounded interesting or would be fun to manipulate. We ended up collecting a whole variety of sounds that got more bizarre as the day went on: microwave, kettle, hole-puncher, keyboards, cabinet doors, fan, lift, toaster, cutlery, munching sounds (at lunch), pouring water into pans/out of pans, bottles falling down stairs, balloons, toilet flushing, Zoe brushing her teeth and a 4-part 'harmony' that we'll not speak of... We collected over 100 recordings - a few really nice, some decent and a lot of rubbish.

The next part of the process was manipulating the sounds. After we had been shown how to use Adobe Audition, we discussed as a group what would be the structure of our piece and if there was to be a theme or motif to reoccur throughout. We drew up diagram for what we wanted it to be like:

As scrappy as this looks, the curved line is how we wanted the structure of our piece to sound like: building up layers to a climatic point in the third section to then die down in the last section.

The main theme of the piece was the idea to have a 'normal' real sound that would last the length of a 30 second section and to have weirder sounds on top as the 'imagination'. The 'imagination' is then interrupted and brought to a halt by the 'normal' sound coming to an end. Combining this with the agreed climatic structure, we started to select our 'normal' sounds and chose ones to manipulate and layer on top. Each of us took turns in working on Audition but it was as a group we made our decisions for how we would create it.

Screen capture of the final mixdown on Adobe Audition.

I enjoyed creating the sound design piece. In some ways it was like a collage type of working process of modifying and combining many individual bits together for a final composition as you went along. This was nice and freeing when in animation you plan and fully know in advance what's going to be in a shot/film and how you will do it. (Unfortunately, I can't upload the track on its own without doing it as a video so you can hear it later in the final animation.)