Sound Design at Venice High

April 23, 2010

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Youth Voices students practice sound recording at Venice High School.

The exploration of sound often gets overlooked in multimedia production, especially in K-12 education. The emphasis on visual representation often overshadows sonic literacy. Perhaps this is due to the world of graphic design and cinematography involving such complex concepts like composition, movement, space, and lighting, and thus involves quite a bit of explanation and practice. Yet, sound can be a great entry way to storytelling in a more controlled environment. For this reason, students explore sound in the Youth Voices curriculum and investigate elements like dialogue, narration, hard effects, ambience, and music and their relationship to narrative.

They listen to various examples of soundscapes are asked questions like, What does the sound of footsteps on asphalt convey?
"It tells us where we are." explains Joseline. "If the footsteps were walking on sand, we would have a different picture in our head as to where the story takes place."

For the third multimedia production workshop, students were asked to identify all the elements of sound and explain its purpose in the narrative. Then it was time for them to develop their own sound projects, combining recorded sounds like narration and dialogue that they generated with found sounds from GarageBand's library. The assignment had loose parameters as to the type of projects they could create. Some produced an audio representation of a personal memory; some made up stories; some went in a very abstract direction. Below are some of the results.

The Donut Shop
by Belsy Hernandez & Luz Ramos