Evaluating my Sound Scape

I feel like I really have managed to achieve something successful through this project because my end result is a completely original sound scape that I have made alone. This has surprised me because I have never used any of the sound recording equipment before and I have never used Adobe Audition either. To be honest before this project I never really paid too much attention to sound and had never had an interest in sound scape's  but now I see from this project the kind of atmospheres you can create just through sound and how difficult it is I have much more respect for it now. I have also really enjoyed working on a project which is so different to usual and isn't like anything I have done before.

My personal sound scape project was really hard at the beginning because my first idea to do with the art piece 'Maman' didn't really work because I couldn't get the recordings I wanted and the ones I did get were of low quality. This left me very uninspired but I soon moved on to 'The Persistence of Memory' art piece instead because this piece has always interested me and after I researched into it inspired me  too. I went with the idea of time being my main theme so I recorded sounds of clocks but also of other tapping and ticking noises which could relate to the piece and be distorted. I knew I wanted to slowly add in more sounds distorting them further and further so that it ended up melting away just like the clocks in the painting do. The hardest part of this though was actually editing them to do this because I had never had much of a chance to try this on audition and some of the effects I wanted to use weren't working. However I did eventually find a way around this and after much experimentation I managed to create a sound scape which had effects such as stretching, pitch bending and reverb to make it the abstract way I had imagined it to be.

I am happy with my sound scape because I know based on my previous skills that it is a personal achievement however I do feel listening back to it that I could have possibly structured it more. I wanted it to be quite random in the structure when I was making it because then it relates to the randomness of a dream however I feel like listening back there isn't enough of a build to it. If I had a bigger build it would have made it much more obvious at the end that I was having the clock melt away. If I had more time I would of gone back and changed this though. I feel like the sounds which are particularly successful however are the fast clicking noises of the pen which I sped up and raised the pitch of to the point where it began to sound more like a bug type noise. I wanted this to be put it to relate back to the ants and reinforce the idea of decay which I think it does in a way. I could have maybe had a variety of these sounds however to keep it more interesting because I had to use the same sound of a pen click twice but editing it slightly different each time I wanted this bug like noise. I have kept one clock solidly ticking in the background for the duration of the piece as the first and last thing that you hear. The ticking however has a pitch bend applied to it which makes it get slower and slower and deeper in pitch as it goes along. I feel like by doing this it is holding the piece together not only structure wise but through narrative too. My only concern with my piece is that it could possibly be misunderstood and risk coming across as bare which isn't the intention I deliberately had quieter moment through out to express the randomness of a dream and also so you could hear the continuous ticking too.

As I have said I like my sound piece but I wish I had longer to develop my skills with all this new equipment and software so that my sound scape could have developed further in style and structure but I feel like it is good for a first attempt and has a strong relationship with the painting it is based on.