A combination of two projects for my Advanced Sound Design class at Savannah College of Art and Design.

The first project was to process sound effects to the point that the "Sound Stamp" was removed; processed to the point that you couldn't tell what the sound was originally.  Then we edited those abstract sounds as the sound effects for a video game trailer.  We focused on elements that would work as abstract sound, leaving out Foley sounds or background sounds.

The second project was practicing advanced rousting and busing within Pro Tools.  We chose a single source sound, bused it to 16 separate tracks, and processed them individually.  The drones in the background are this second project.

Some highlights:

The source sound I used for the second project was a recording I did of bowing a long steel cable:

http://soundcloud.com/krevuk/inductor-fish-wire (the 9th sound in the recording is what I used)

I slowed it way down using Paul Stretch:

http://hypermammut.sourceforge.net/paulstretch/

The sound originally had some tonal qualities, and I matched the harmonic change with the picture.  Among other things I used band pass filters, comb filters, etc to create an evolving sonic landscape.

The cracking sound used during the Bioware logo, and again when the shuttle crashed was originally a recording of a gunshot.  I stretched it out using "monophonic" elastic audio, which is normally used for stretching solo voices without changing the pitch.  In this case I abused it past the point of failure, which caused the audio to be chopped into small sections.  I also copied the sound to a "Vari-speed" elastic audio track, which stretches the pitch as well as the speed.  I used this process for the slow-down sections as well, timing the stretch to the action.

Because each project was worked on separately, and then combined after the fact for possible extra credit, I used a multi-band compressor on the drones with some of the abstract sounds as the side-chain input.  That way the drone would get out of the way for the more interesting sounds.

The ESRB warning was quite popular in my class.  I had the idea pretty much right off the bat, even though it technically didn't follow the rules of the project (the 'sound stamp' wasn't removed, you could tell it was children saying "yeaaah!").  I used the Lo-Fi plugin in Pro Tools, which can destructively downsample audio, and modulated the sample rate; bringing you from real sound, into the abstract.

Video: SW:TOR "Deceived" trailer.

Sound Effects edited in Pro Tools 9-10

Digi-design, Waves, and GRM plugins used.

Sound effects from our college's sound effects library.

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