MDDN 314: Situational Sounds

In order to assemble the soundscape that I want, I needed to first decide on what it would be. The brief was fairly open, allowing for a fair bit of playing around in terms of what we wanted to do. The first thing that I decided was that I wanted to do something a bit different. I wanted to take this project somewhere where you can't go in real life. I wanted to create a space for the future. One space that I've enjoyed on the odd occasion in Wellington has been the railway station, so I decided to do a futuristic railway station. 

Erm. Excuse my French, I actually mean The HyperTrain Transit Station. Much better. This station will feature a range of things, as I decided one late afternoon that I really needed to plan out everything I wanted in my soundscape. This involved actually thinking of all the layers of sound that exist in a futuristic train station. And when you start thinking about all the sounds involved, that number gets pretty large.

After writing that list and figuring out which sounds I would need to make personally and which sounds I could record, I took a trip over to the train station, and did some field recordings there. All of the sounds that I got there will make up the bulk of the "background ambience" of the HTTS. Once I returned, I got into making my own sounds. This proved to be a lot of fun, and I really enjoyed just playing around with the effects and with the way I could create different noises.


One of the first elements I gave work was the advertisements. I see the future as being very invasive in the way that ads get used. This is evidenced in all sorts of movies, such as Blade Runner and The Minority Report. I wanted to recreate this feeling of the advertisements being everywhere.

Advertisements regarding off-world expansion seemed to be a must have, as well as to create an obligatory Blade Runner reference.

One aspect of the world that I wanted to create was this notion of Synthetics (androids) being seen in a bad light. One of the ads that I made references the idea that Synthetics were developed to be slaves, but developed true sentience and could no longer be slaves.

Creating futuristic car noises was so much fun. I really enjoyed the creation of an endless volley of different-but-similar sounds. That, and it's just really fun to say Niiiiiiiaaaaaaaooooooooommmmm.

This is a noise that I generated and manipulated heavily in Audacity. Originally generated as noise, I then overlaid several frequencies onto it, to give it a metallic vent drone, as if it were the sound of a train idling or an air conditioning unit.