Journey of a Coffee Bean_Final_mixdown.mp3
I worked with Nakyung to produce Journey of a Coffee Bean, our take on a ‘Sound Vacation’. We wanted to give listeners the sensation of leaving their own human bodies and transporting into the form of a coffee bean, experiencing every twist and turn of its harrowing but ultimately transformative journey.
In the first week, we brainstormed ways to make an exciting and immersive storyline. Here was our original arc that we came up with:
Exposition: You become a coffee bean! You are in a bag in a grocery store in New York City. Rising Action: You just were bought! You travel home and get put into a grinder :( Climax: Your coffee master transfers you to a coffee machine to be brewed.There is a lot of heat and torture and strange noises; it is the hardest stage of your journey. Falling Action: You are poured out into the perfect cup of coffee! Conclusion: Your brewer sips and enjoys you. Thank you for your sacrifice.
We also recorded the sounds if finding and purchasing coffee beans in a grocery store near Union Square, as well as coffee pouring and sipping in a boba shop and (because it was raining) Bobst Library. In our own time, we recorded various other sounds we needed: coffee grinding, ice cubes clinking, a coffee machine bubbling.
In the second week, we got to work editing all of our sounds together. The first step was to cut all our clips to their most essential parts, since many of our clips went over a minute long. We also thought adding fade in and outs for each clip was a nice touch to make transitions less jarring.
What our sound files in Audition ultimately ended up looking like.
We utilized the spot healing tool a lot during our project, mostly to take out distracting background noises in our sound clips.
This was the feature I was most impressed by in Audition; it did a really great job not only visually representing layers of sound but also intelligently removing it as well.
We also used FreeSound.org to source a clip of someone coming home, and spliced it up into our project. We used the impulse of a Living Room to added extra reverb into the sound file. Impulse Responses was something I studied in an undergraduate course in electronic music, and so I was really excited to see Audition have a robust system for using these effects. I’d love to play around more with this feature in future projects, both with their preloaded choices and sourcing other Impulse Responses from FreeSound.
Other effects we used include the Denoise effect, as well as a FFT filter in some clips to soften higher pitched noises like squeaky footprints. We attempted to get rid of background music entirely in our very first clip in the supermarket using a Center Channel Extractor effect, but ultimately it wasn’t as effective we wanted. We figured having music in the background of our audio provided a more immersive and realistic experience. Still, I’d love to understand how to implement this effect correctly so that I could use it in future projects.
Overall, I had a really nice time working on this project! It was my first exposure to Audition, and while the plethora of features felt overwhelming at times, I felt like by the end I had the core loop down. I hope our final product is a small, exciting experience that briefly lets you see things from a different perspective.
