Sonic Design:Final Project

Sonic Design:Final Project

5/12/2024 - 5/1/2025 (Week15 - Week 17) 

LI YUHAN / 0379857

For the final project of our "Sound Design" course, our core task was to reconstruct all the sound effects for a silent game video. This was a complete build from the ground up, covering environmental atmosphere, character actions, and various interactive sounds.

Project Planning and Professional Recording

After understanding the project requirements at the beginning of the semester, I began planning. In week eleven, having selected the first vedio as my source material, I promptly booked the school's recording studio, hoping to complete the core sound effects in a professional environment.

On Monday morning, I entered the recording studio with two classmates and began working under the full guidance of our instructor, Mr. Razif. Thanks to the professional equipment and environment, we efficiently recorded a large number of dialogue lines, routine action sounds, and material interaction effects. However, for sounds that could potentially damage the sensitive studio equipment or required specific conditions—such as water sounds or using a microwave—we decided to record them later at home.

Home Recording and Creative Discovery

Sound Usage List:

After the professional recording session, I moved on to the more experimental phase of home recording. This process was like sonic alchemy, searching for possibilities among everyday objects.

The most enlightening discovery came from simulating the character's jump sound effect. After several unsuccessful attempts with other methods, I accidentally blew air through a straw into a glass of water—a series of dense, crisp bubble-popping sounds, "pupu," emerged. This turned out to be the perfect sound effect I had been searching for to represent the character's light, springy jump. To capture the cleanest version, I worked until 2 a.m., waiting for the entire building to fall completely silent before successfully recording it.

Similarly, the bomb's "beep-beep-beep" warning sound came from a household microwave, and the muffled thud of explosions was simulated by stomping hard on the floor. While recorded in a limited home environment, these sounds were full of unexpected creativity.

Post-Production Refinement and Audio-Visual Synchronization

After importing all the audio into editing software, the most meticulous phase began: audio-visual synchronization. I entered a state of intense focus: eyes glued to the millisecond markers on the timeline, repeatedly comparing the visual action with the rise and fall of the sound.

The video runs at 24 frames per second; even a 0.1-second misalignment can create a sensory disconnect. I ensured the frame of the character landing perfectly matched the footstep sound, and that mechanical rotations aligned precisely with metal grinding noises. For a continuous fight scene, I split a long sound effect into several segments, adjusting the rhythm and volume of each one to build a dynamic auditory hierarchy.

Audio Processing and Integration

Sound timing arrangement:

To better integrate the home-recorded sound effects into the game world, I performed detailed post-processing:

The equipment I use for recording at home is the DJI Mic Mini. It has a pretty good noise reduction effect, so the quality of the recorded audio is quite high. For the remaining noise, I used the noise reduction effect in Audacity.

Explosion Sound:

• Sound Effect: Stomping hard on the floor
• Recording Process: Recorded in the middle of the night in a quiet room using my microphone
• Sound Mixing:Added room reverb and EQ processing to the stomping sounds used for explosions, making them sound more like they occurred inside the game environment.

Character Jump Sound Effect

• Sound Effect: Blowing bubbles in a water glass with a straw to create a popping sound
• Recording Process: Recorded late at night in a quiet room using my microphone held close to the water surface
• Sound Mixing:Since it was recorded by hand, this audio still contains a fair amount of background noise despite using a professional microphone. I applied noise reduction using the app 'LeJian' to make it sound cleaner. Then I adjusted the pitch to make it resemble a crisp, explosive sound.

stomping sounds 

character's movement through the pipe

• Sound Effect: Blowing bubbles in a water glass with a straw to create a popping sound
• Recording Process: Recorded late at night in a quiet room using my microphone held close to the water surface
• Sound Mixing:I also used this underwater bubble-blowing sound for the character's movement through the pipe. However, I stretched the audio to make it sound more suited to traversing the pipe, and then aded a metallic-textured reverb suggestive of a confined space to the sounds of the character moving through pipes.

Crackling popping sounds

• Sound effect: Squeezing bubble wrap with force, like wringing out a towel
• Recording process: Using my microphone in a quiet room late at night
• Audio mixing:Used pitch modulation on the recorded curtain-pulling sound to make it seem lighter and faster, fitting the object's texture within the game.

a series of small explosions

Character moving through grass sound

• Sound effect: Artificial grass lightly hitting the ground
• Recording process: Recorded in the school recording studio
• Audio mixing: The sound quality recorded in the school recording studio was exceptionally clean with no background noise, so I only applied these adjustments.Applied parametric EQ to ambient sounds  to enhance presence and better match the visuals.

The sound of the iron gate closing

• Sound effect: Home security iron gate
• Recording process: Recorded with a small microphone while closing the home security iron gate in the middle of the night
• Mixing: Since this sound effect in the video feels like it's happening indoors, I added an indoor reverb to make it sound more fitting.

Regarding the transitions between certain sound effects:

In track editing, made extensive use of crossfades and clip overlapping to ensure smooth, natural transitions between different sound effects.

to ensure smooth

Summary

After completing the project, my auditory perception has been permanently altered. I now instinctively deconstruct the sound design in films and TV shows and listen to the "sonic character" of objects in daily life.

This project was far more than a technical exercise. It gave me hands-on experience with the complete sound design pipeline: fromplanning and professional collaborative recording, to creative home Foley work, and finally to meticulous post-production synthesis. I gained a deep appreciation for how sound constitutes half the universe of immersion, and how the process of creating sound is essentially learning to listen to the world more profoundly.

• Files link:The link to my GooleDrive
  
• Audios link:The sounds I have used