Sound Design Media Project Brief and Submission Guidelines Dr Martin Parker & Dr Owen Green 2017–18 1 Contents 1. Aims of the project 3 2. Project Context 4 3. Submission 1: Recording, Editing and Constructing 6 3.1. Submission Details ........................ 6 3.2. Submission Contents in Detail .................. 7 3.2.1. The sound kit ........................... 7 3.2.2. The Sound Designs ........................ 8 3.2.3. The Project Description ...................... 9 3.2.4. The Recording Log ........................ 9 3.3. Further Notes ........................... 10 3.4. Suggested Working Method ................... 11 4. Submission 2: Focusing, Manipulating and Animating 12 4.1. Submission Details ........................ 12 4.2. Further Notes ........................... 14 Appendix A. Sound Formatting Requirements 17 A.1. General Guidelines ........................ 17 A.2. Post-processing of Kit Sounds (Submission 1) ......... 19 A.3. File-naming Convention ..................... 19 Appendix B. Criteria for Assessment 20 B.1. Assessing Sound Designs .................... 20 B.2. Individual Submissions, Cooperative Work? ........... 22 2 1. Aims of the project • To help participants to develop fluency and extend existing skills in recording, editing, processing and contextualising sound. • To provide opportunities to think about ways of exciting sound from objects to achieve specific results and will create a chance to look closely at the way sound can be recorded and edited so that it may serve multiple purposes in a library context. • To understand the potential of sounds to be processed into new sonic forms via a range of approaches from standard DSP, mixing, EQing, layering and cross synthesis in order to generate original works of sound design. • To foster awareness and insight about the way sounds are described and en- tered into databases, how they should be categorised and explained so that search engines and other sound designers can find and use the sounds. Sound library production is a small part of the project however, the sounds themselves need to be used(!) and participants will be expected to make ex- tensive use of the sounds they submit to the library in a creative application for an imagined device, thing or scene. • To lead participants towards insight into collaborative processes with other practitioners. Whilst the collaborative process itself will not be directly as- sessed and given credit, you will work together with others to gather and eval- uate your resources. • The project will expect its participants to keep a record of their processes (recording and processing logs) in order that they, or others might be able to recreate similar work in the future. • To push sound designers to develop their creative and expressive voice and to challenge them to apply (at times) abstract conceptual ideas introduced in lecture and tutorial sessions to works of sound design that may end up in their professional and/or artist portfolio. It also expects its participants to push themselves technically, to use the tutorials and lectures on mixing and balancing sound in particular in their finished sound designs. • Finally, the project aims to provide a firm and well defined project brief that participants are expected to explore and respond to in imaginative, diverse and creative ways. 3 2. Project Context A scenario: The year is 2146. The increasing effects of climate change have led to rising global temperatures. In addition to wide areas of equatorial land becoming too hot to support life, the ice caps and glaciers across the world have all melted, resulting in vast coastal submersions of cities and civilisations. Following on from the widespread deaths, riots and panics caused by devastating weather conditions—tornadoes, tidal waves, and endless droughts—humankind has started to regroup and rebuild. While some populations have withdrawn to higher, protected ground, other groups have decided to exploit the seas, which are now adjusting to the changed salinity and higher levels, and provide a rich source of food and energy. With several regions still unsafe to reoccupy due to radiation remaining from nuclear power station meltdowns, the majority of the world?s energy is now sourced from renewable sources. Most oceanic energy comes from geothermal sources deep in the ocean beds, harvested in highly pressurised, protected dome facilities. This energy fuels industry and business, while residential energy is generated from tidal power farms and massive floating solar arrays. The older nations have fragmented and recombined, creating new joint oceanic states. Their populations are distributed across a network of pressurised undersea cities: domes on the ocean floor, mainly given over to power generation and heavy industry; residential habitats based underwater and some distance offshore in order to minimise the effects of the continuing storm patterns. These habitats also are generally linked with aquatic food farming and service industries. Finally, on the sur- face, clinging to the final remnants of island archipelagoes or the ruins of the great coastal cities of the past, are the frontiers of the new civilisations—trading posts with the remaining land-bound populations, centres for land-based agriculture, as well as tourism and heritage sites highlighting the best (and worst) of the old world… . This setting is going to form the imaginative backdrop to the work you produce in the project. We want you to engage with how these possible future settings may sound: what would the soundscape of an underwater city be like? How would it compare to a contemporary urban soundscape? How might the various machines sound? Transport systems? Social rituals? Your colleagues on the course 3D and Animated Design have been furnished with the same scenario and, as the project progresses, your respective bodies of work will inform each other (I’ll come back to that in a minute). In this first phase, however, your work will be exploratory: you will develop a SoundKit— a well-organised library of short sounds—orientated towards assembling sound de- signs that respond to this scenario. A series of short designs will demonstrate the usefulness and applicability of your kit. These kits will then be shared later in the course, both between the Sound Designers 4 as well as the 3D Animators. In this sense then you will have a client to bear in mind, so paying attention to how useable your kit is (even for a non-expert) will be important. Likewise, the work that the 3D Animators produce for their first submission is go- ing to be shared with you in order to provide a backdrop to your final submission. Here is some additional context that feeds into what the animators are asked to produce: …Given the nature of these new nations, high-speed and reliable transport systems have become an essential part of the infrastructure. The lower populations coupled with clean renewable energy sources mean that the habitats have been linked with high-speed mag-lev lines, protected within high-tensile transparent tubes that allow the passengers to look out at the surrounding ocean as they pass through and above it. As these transport systems are such a central aspect of everyday life, each nation has chosen to celebrate its heritage in the appearance of the trains, carriages and the station areas themselves. The transit tubes are large enough to accommodate non-standard extensions and modifications to the standard transit train. A side ef- fect of the improved maglev technology has meant that heat is generated within the train’s magnetic coils during travel—this has been harnessed to provide an updated steam power source for use within the train for ancillary power usage (lights, cater- ing, entertainment, onboard systems). The resulting train designs therefore resemble the advanced tech, steampunk designs often depicted in early 21st century popular literature. Some of the stations have been in continuous use now for over 50 years, and the marks of wear and use are evident—rust, water staining, corrosion, are all common. Others are newly built, and gleam brightly, reflecting the many lights picking out all the details showcasing their heritage. The 3D Animators will be working towards producing an animation of a maglev train, specifically tailored towards the idiosyncracies of one of these notional oceanic com- munities, and their first submission will be a static model of their train design. In your second submission we ask you to use one of these models as a source of inspira- tion for developing further sound resources and designs, such that you are able to ’sonify’ their model. Note, we’re not expecting you to develop a sync’ed soundtrack for your colleagues’ animations. 5 3. Submission 1: Recording, Editing and Constructing In this exploratory phase you are building a sound kit, to be used in similar ways to Lego or Meccano, where base building blocks can be combined to create almost anything. A key characteristic of Meccano and Lego is that whilst the finished items look like helicopters, cars, spaceships etc, yet they also look like they’ve been built with Mec- cano and Lego. The finished forms are usually characterful, complex and unique. SoundKits work the same way, they combine together to sound like the things they represent, but their component parts are also evident in the finished item. Once a kit exists, it can be used to create literally thousands of different things. The success of this depends upon the way the kit is categorised and catalogued and the careful, scalable design of each component. You’ll first create a library of kit components, organise the components into sensible form and then construct three imaginary things, events, or actions from your kit in order to represent the flexibility and multi-use nature of the SoundKit you’ve created. 3.1. Submission Details This submission will consist of four top-level folders zipped up as a single file and uploaded to the submissions system by the date specified in the course calendar https://digital.eca.ed.ac.uk/sounddesignmedia/.