Making the sound walk was fun!! We had a few ideas after gathering material during week one, including a haunted elevator, an elevator ASMR experience, or giving a narrated tour of what each floor in 721 Broadway focuses on. We settled on a meditation pardody track, to help people breathe through some common anxieties experienced in the elevator, and an examination of forced space-sharing.
Without further ado, the ITP Wellevator Meditation!
At first we were going to have a lot of action, and sounds that can really ruin an elevator experience. We decided to have me do the meditation narration (I wanted to parody "youtube meditation voice"), which I did in my partner's basement in his recording studio. I had to strong-arm him away from doing any mixing on the vocals—he moonlights as a production engineer, and therefore it's instinct for him to make everything sound good! But I got the track from him in its totally raw form so I could figure out the mixing myself in accordance to class.
Aileen and Rachel spent the weekend recording other foley for the "action." But recording the meditation ended up being 10 minutes of sound in and of itself, and we realized that 3-5 minutes is actually very short in terms of narrative arch. So when we got together to collaborate on Monday, we narrowed the focus.
I found two parts of the project difficult: first, scheduling collaboration time. We have a lot of the same classes, but very different work schedules, so besides the three hours together on Monday we would meet two at a time or work on the track solo and send the project back to the group for the next round of work. We had a small setback in not understanding how to send a project file, so Monday night one of our group mates spent time working on the mix and sent it to the rest of the group without attaching the sound files, so the other two worked from scratch the next morning until we could figure out how to combine all the work.
The other difficult part for me specifically was learning how to step back. Since I have some (albeit experimental) sound experience, I knew the basics around cutting, mixing, effects, etc. and really had to stop myself from going full steam on the project. Learning to trust the collaboration and let go when the track wasn't in my hands was a challenge, thank you to my patient collaborators!!!
