sonic DESIGN:

Project 3 - Auditory Storytelling

24.05.2024 - 07.06.2024 (WEEK 8-10)

Koh Xin Yee / 0363349 / Bachelor of Interactive Spatial Design (Hons)

Sonic Design

Project 3

Project 3: Auditory Storytelling

To do:

Students are to pick one popular fairy-tale story of their choice and create and audiobook.
The task is a step up from auditory imaging whereby now the students not only need to think about suitable soundscape, but they need to record the voice with the suitable voice acting and bring it all together with sound effects to highlight and enhance the storytelling experience.
Imagine that this is a show for radio

Process:

The fairy tale I chose is "The Golden Goose".

The script I'm using is from this website: https://sooperbooks.com/story/the-golden-goose/

The Golden Goose | Free Story & Audiobook | Dragons’ Den

I recorded the narration and dialouge seperately, as I'm not a pro in voice acting, so recording all the different voices in different session will be easier to handle.

Editing the narrator's voice and character's voice seperately, cutting out the NGs parts and make sure that the storytelling and voice acting is smooth.

capture noise print for noise reduction

noise reduction process

cut and combine the two voice tracks together in a multitrack session

adding bus track for voice-over tracks for easier control

using Dynamics - AudioGate - Threshold to remove the breathing sound

trying DeEsser by finding the loudest "s" sound in the voice-over track

using Spectral Frequency Display - easier to identify all the "s" throughout the sound track

taking noise print of the "s" sound

split into preview mode

can clearly see that the bright yellow in the selected part is faded away at the preview mode

I also use Auto Heal (Ctrl + U) to remove some background noices with aren't clean enough, such as sound of swallowing or clearing the throat.

Then I found out that a faster way is straight away using the same way of noise reduction, I just had to capture the swallowing sound as noise print.

But it was still not that clean though, so I still needed to clean the rest of them manually.

Voice-over bus track (draft)

voice over bus track 1.0.wav

After listening to the whole voice-over track for a few times, I felt like the voice acting is not enough, so maybe I will need to add some effects to the voice of the characters to better differenciate them. Especially the youngest son's voice is too similar to the narrator's voice, as I'm using my normal voice during the recording, so there is a need to make some edits.

So I spilt the voice-overs into few more tracks in the multitrack session, still putting them under the same bus track for easier overall control.

For the "little old man's" voice, I used Pitch Shifter and reduced the semi-tones to make the voice sound deeper, more similar to an old man.

The original voice is quite similar to the father's voice.

But it was not long before I found out that the voice sounds very distorted if I shift the pitch to a deeper voice.

So I played around with other effects and came across a better one, "Stretch and Pitch". Sadly it can't be added to the effects rack in the multitrack session (I can only add Pitch Shifter to it, but I don't like the results), so I had to manually select the voice-over parts of the old man in the all-characters voice over track and add in the pitch shift effect.

Somewhat it seems to me that increasing the splicing frequency to somewhere 150-200Hz, the voice wouldn't sound so distorted even if it was pitch shifted.

After all the testings I'm quite satisfied with the outcome of my "little old man's" voice-over.

I did the same thing to the "youngest son's" voice-over to differenciate it from the narrator's voice. I only reduced the semitone to around -2 to lower the voice a little bit enough, so it sound's like a young man or a teen, not my actual voice.