Late night Brainstorming Session and a New Idea for Proposal

 I don’t know why but in the last couple days I really struggled to write anything meaningful for my soundscape sound design project idea. I also can’t seem to come up with a valid rationale for an academic project like this and all I can seem to think of is personal development which is just not good enough.

 Anyway, I really can’t sleep tonight. I am really stressed, depressed and generally feeling down because of my lack of progress. Since I couldn’t sleep I decided to a brainstorming session. I know it sounds weird, but I decided that if the Uni is stressing me out so much I need to fight it head-on, so that’s why I decided to have this impromptu brainstorming session. I began by thinking totally outside the box. I thought about sound design but from a different perspective. Normally the way we do sound design is done in a DAW like Pro Tools, and for example layering of sound effects is carefully thought out process. I thought, what could happen if you turn this idea on its head and if I could create a sound design tool/plug-in that could randomise the process to hopefully create some interesting sounds. I thought it could be a good idea to apply this technique to generate a certain type of sound, like a gun-shot, a punch, or a cinematic trailer hit. Below I present some notes that I took down during the brainstorming session:

• The hit generator: Create a VST like software (or plugin) to generate customised ‘bigger-than-life’ Hollywood style punches and hits out of a library of pre-recorded and synthesised sounds and based on a set of user defined parameters.
• Combine elements of real-life recorded sounds (newspaper hits, vegetable abuse, face slaps etc) with synthesised sounds (like bass hits and claps for add low end and crack to the attack)
• [All samples would be phase aligned and matched to remove possible unwanted cancelation]
• Every punch or hit would be different than the other because of randomised sample selection and could range in scale from small hits to big cinematic speaker shattering knock-outs
• That can be used in low budget film productions and or video games, where there are budget limitations in hiring a professional foley stage and to not to rely on stock sounds.
• Demonstrate the use of the created software on a series of clips from existing films, and re-design fight scenes in film examples raging from Raging Bull, Indiana Jones to Ted.

I will proceed to expand and flesh out this idea and send it to Kenny for feedback by the end of the week.