I wanted to get a feel for our our Boston soundscape will eventually sound (and get a better idea of the tools we have to work with) to I made two demos in Audacity using free sounds (mostly from the YouTube Free Audio Library, with the exception of one royalty free dice rolling effect.)

My first step was to find what a good “base” would be for a background sound. For the tavern, it was crowd murmurs. For the walk through Boston, it was footsteps through snow and slush. After that I added sound effects at regular but organic intervals. For the tavern, this included sneezing, laughing, chewing, bottles, plates, etc. For the walk through Boston, this included stress creaks, dogs barking, crows, horses and carriages, and many other sounds – but with the added challenge of trying to “zone” them, so it would accurately sound like moving through space.

Working with Audacity was difficult at first, but slowly became more familiar. I have some minimal experience with basic video editing programs and was expecting Audacity to work similar to those programs. In many ways it did, although some tools were different and controlling playback wasn’t as straightforward as it seemed. It took my longer than it should have to figure out the difference between pausing and actually stopping playback to continue editing. The program did seem to have much stronger capabilities than I was using however, and I feel like my current understanding only scratches the surface of what I could be doing.

The soundscapes currently exist as tracks without much interaction, but our end goal is to set certain sounds to specific locations on a map so that the soundscape occurs naturally in relation to the player.