Audio

Of course, since creating this audio, my ideas changed drastically, and so I decided that I would have no background noise in my environment, instead focusing on the noise my asset would make when the player interacts with it.

I wanted this noise to be like an ominous chime, similar to the background noise I had initially created for my first environment idea. I thought that if I just distorted a more regular noise significantly in audacity, I would be able to make an effective sounds easily. I went onto YouTube and downloaded this sound effect of a triangle (as seen on the top left), and placed it in audacity (which is a free sound editing software pre-downloaded on the college computers). I cut it down so that only one of the chimes can be heard, and then started to distort it.

First, of course, I messed around with the reverb settings, adding a lot of damp echoing to the sound. Of course, I am no expert on audio editing, and so for the most part I was just pushing and pulling the settings until they felt right. After the reverb, I pulled up the equalization graph and applied the pre-set bass boost to the audio. At first this didn't do much, but when I ran it through a second time it was so boosted that it distorted, and sounded very strange; I continued to mess with the settings until it sounded right. In the final audio, you can still hear a little bit of the distortion, where it sounds very deep and wobbly. I wanted to keep this to some degree, since I liked the unnerving effect it had on my peers, who I asked to sample my audio as I went along. My final step was to change the pitch of the audio slightly so that it sounded a little deeper, giving it a more ethereal feel.

Once I had done all this, I exported it to a .wav format, ready to be put in Unreal. You can hear the final audio to the bottom left.