Binaural Soundscape for Cogro - Olivia Nicholson

I recorded my soundscape at Common Ground Coffee House in the Queen’s ARC. Specifically, I sat at the table in front of the bagel station. The sounds in this location consisted of lots of people talking, background music, tables/chairs being pushed around, and any machinery sounds which came from behind the café’s counter.

When creating my piece, I wanted to take the listener through a few transformations, however, I started it with the real sounds in order to set the listener up to being in the space.

I wanted the first transformation to be introduced subtly. This way, the listener is gradually introduced into each sound transformation so that they seem more “real”. I decided to take specific sounds and have them “echo”, by placing them in different tracks which were panned to come from different places around the listener.

In my second transformation, I wanted to play with the location of the sounds, making them appear far away, in a larger or smaller space, and coming from different places around the user. To do this, I used ReaEQ and Ambeo Orbit plugins. I started with the sounds appearing far away, and gradually re-introduced the sound as being close to the listener.

Since the audio is generally pretty clear and distinguishable as fragments of conversation, my final transformation was to make these sounds seem distorted. I did this by simply reversing a few tracks, layering them, changing the pitch, and playing around with ReaEQ.

Finally, I ended the piece with the original audio to take the listener back to the real sounds of the place.