I had a little experience with Audacity prior to this project, but I only ever used it as a means to record and trim audio that would eventually go into a video editor. This was my first time really delving into Audacity as a tool to create entire projects. As such, I wanted to select a topic that would let me explore how actions could be described for an audience without seeing them. A heist was my first and best idea for this goal, being personally exciting to create and filled with potential for fast-paced and dynamic action.
My first challenge in the development of Stealing the Sanguine Fang was understanding how to frame the narrative. It occurred to me that there would have to be dialog to link together the actions in the heist, but I struggled with how that dialog would be justified in the story world. I considered framing this as the story someone was telling in an interrogation. Ultimately I settled on the end result, where the previous explanation of the plan and the present execution of the plan are being expressed concurrently. Then it also dawned on me that I would actually have to solve the heist to depict it. The best way I went about this was making lists of actions that could potentially happen in a heist, and then picking some out and organizing them into a timeline. Below is a picture of that process, where I plotted my narrative out on my bedroom wall.
What was most useful about this process is that it let me practice thinking about what audio components create different but similar scenes, and how these components transition into each other. From this outline, I looked for matching audio from Freesound to lay it out in Audacity.
To discuss the baseline criteria, I have an exported mp3 of the final product on my fork of the repository, running just a little over four minutes. The soundscape itself is ~3:30, but adding on the ending accreditation makes it run a bit longer. The end of the mp3 directs listeners to my assets.md file which shows the credits for my sourced sounds, as well as listing the sounds I created. Some of these original sounds include my narration, papers unfurling, the detonator button pressing, a door closing and locking, and a lamp turning on (most of these occur at the very beginning of the piece). There are usually at least three tracks overlapping due to my narration, the background sound, and the sounds of the actions occurring. The most notable overlapping of sounds occurs during the climax: the fire alarm, the crowd panic, the sounds of running, and the sounds of stealing the dagger all come to a head here.
I use several effects throughout the project, including fading in & out (ex. police sirens), noise reduction (ex. the voice lines), and reverb (ex. the sound of microphone tapping)
As for the aspirational criteria, all the effects listed above are new to me, as well as the use of the envelope tool. The envelope tool was incredibly useful in fine-tuning the volume, especially in situations where I want to make the background noise a little quieter while I'm talking and then go back to its regular volume. I use left/right panning to create locationality in my piece. The best example of this is the police siren coming from the left, picking up the fall guys at the center, and then driving away to the right. I did this by splitting the left and right tracks and then using fades to make it sound like a continuous motion between them. Below is an example of both the envelope tool and panning.
While I did my best to clean up the lines recorded by my siblings (shoutout to Nichy and Ate), there is still some fuzz to them due to them recording remotely rather than using my microphone. However, I'd argue that all the narration recorded by myself is clear and effectively paced through the narrative. The organizational scheme is clear; the scenes follow the narrator's descriptions, using sharp-cut transitions facilitated by a "whoosh" effect whenever the location changes. I justify the "woosh" as a representation of the main character jumping to different ideas in the plan, bridging the gap between the real-time events as they happen and the description of the events as they're discussed. Lastly, my commit messages usually refer back to the scheduled date they're associated with and/or provide a brief description of what has been edited.
Finally, thank you to everyone who provided feedback! I incorporated a few of everyone's suggestions into the final draft.
From Isabelle's feedback, I added the bathroom door and the sound of footsteps entering and exiting the house at the start and end of the narration. It may be hard to tell, but there are three sets of footsteps at the beginning, and only two at the end since Buzz stays behind to talk to the main character.
From Kaitlyn's feedback, I worked on cutting a lot of the space within the project in general. Initially, I thought it was paced with realistic timing, but after workshopping I found it better to lean into the tightness of describing the plan and keeping the momentum going. (I also experimented with music, but in the end found it hard to balance without being distracting and retiming a lot of my stuff. Maybe I'll come back to it!)
From Jenna's feedback, I improved the noise reduction on the dialog. But more importantly, because of this comment, I realized that there was a static sound in the ambient museum noise I was looping through the whole piece, so I was able to cut that out.