At the end of last semester we had a final major project for sound practice – an audio book!!!
We could choose any text or book we wanted and had to turn it into audio! The audio had to be between 7 and 15min. You could chose either you to make the sound for your text file without a narrator so the final product would seem like it was from a movie or.. not!
I chose not to have any narrator. I chose the first chapter of the book “1Q84” from Haruki Murakami.
Here is the full script!
I crossed only the text I wanted to include on my audio because it was relevant to the story. In pink it’s the main character’s lines and in yellow the taxi driver.
The first step:
- Underline the important parts of the script, read it out loud and time it to see if it didn’t go over 15min.
- Searching for a lot of samples of little sounds I needed like cars honking, wind, a zipper of a bag.
- Make folleys (record my own sounds) like taking coins from a wallet…
- Record the voices I wanted in Católica’s studio with Leonor, a colleague of mine.
- Ask for a voice over on internet for the taxi driver’s voice.
The second step:
- Cut and edit the voice over of Leonor, remove all the mistakes and make it smooth. I also had to choose between several tries she made of the same sentence to see which one fit better the context. I made make some human sounds like “hmm” and “ooh” so I could express her emotions by sound.
- Between all the samples I gathered, choose the best ones and potentially look for new ones.
- Organize my audio tracks so I don’t get lost and prepare to start the real editing!
This step looked more or less like this:
The third step:
- Editing and synchronizing all the sounds so it all works together.
- Adding sound effects to create deepness on the voices
- Changing the stereo channels of the sound to the left and right to create a more immersive experience
- Hear it 1 million times until my head hurts
- Show the teacher and make small changes!
This was a rather summed up report of how this project went but it took me 2 weeks to finish… And most of the time was on the 2nd and 3rd steps.
My final audio file could be a little better but for my first audio book I am happy about it!
HERE you can hear my audio book!
On my profile there is also a Vox pop that I did, check it out!!!
7 thoughts on “Audio Book – Sound Practice”
Not an easy task… I believe you were able to use the technics, mixing, audio dubbing, although it seems once inside the car, sound could have been mastered better, voices are “artificial” to the surrouding environment specially once the scene happened during a traffic jam.
I also feel (by hearing) that speech lacks a bit of rythm, I wonder if when your record the voices, they were text reading without hearing the other persons voice and speech at the same time, to exactly match a normal conversation rythm?
On the other end, your VoxPop shows all of it, rythm, creativity, engagement, master mixing and audio dubing, so in the end this exercise worked perfectly for your studies and research to learn and master these technics. Congratulations.
Yes, none of the 2 Characters listened to the other speak when they were recording their own voice which made it look like a weird conversation when it comes to intuition. I learned for Next time 😉
Glad you liked the Vox pop! It was a very different project and a lot easier to manage!