For this project I did a foley recording session in Abertay's recording studio. I used a condenser mic and began playing around with props. I thoroughly enjoyed this process and I made sure to carefully listen for the possible use cases. I’m most proud of my Monster1.wav sound. That sound is a mix of two bricks sliding together plus pulling on the leather handle of a suitcase that I found in the recording studio. I edited it with reverb and some other effects and ended up with a great monster sound. This project taught me to listen to the world much more carefully. During my foley recording session, I was interrupted by the fire alarm. At first this seemed like a disappointing waste of time, because we didn’t have the recording studio for much longer after that. However, it turned out to be useful, because I turned the fire alarm sound into a nerve-wrecking ambient noise. It was a lot of fun trying to imagine what sounds could be turned into a horrifying monster noise and I was often left surprised by what prop eventually got me the result I wanted.​

 

Looking back at this project I realise how much I’ve learned. I enjoyed audio design way more than I expected and I’m very happy to have been introduced to Wwise and Reaper. I think I could have pushed certain rooms more by adding a lot more nuance, but overall, I’m happy with the result. It can be quite tricky listening to your own sounds so many times because you can get quite numb to the whole player experience. That’s why I made sure to ask feedback regularly. This led me to adding a clock ticking noise in the first room, which made a huge difference in my opinion. At first the evening ambient noise with chirping birds seemed very out of place, because it almost felt like you were outside rather than inside a bedroom. By adding a clock sound, it became clearer that the bird sounds were coming from the windows, because that sound was more distant compared to the ticking clock that was very clearly coming from inside the room. I also changed the carpet footstep sounds after some feedback that that was the only unconvincing sound in my game. This was yet another sound that I had gotten so used to that I couldn’t hear the error anymore, but after changing it, it made a world of difference. Once I started listening more carefully to the world around me it opened my eyes (or should I say ears) to the endless possibilities and the ridiculous ways you can use props to create the sounds you’d imagined. This was my first experience with audio design, and definitely not my last.