The Unexisted Station Recording
Introduction
This project aims to create an immersive audio experience with a sound-based short film without visual style. This is about a girl who is accidentally transported to an unexisted MTR station by a train, then she meets supernatural things and gets chased by an evil. The processed sound effects created a weird ambience.
Inspiration
My inspiration comes from the urban legend of Kisaragi Station and the film “Silent Hill”. The first one is about a passenger sharing her experience of accidentally enter a strange station by a train on internet, and the second is about a town in another dimension surrounded by mysterious power. I combined two ideas and created a horror story in the recording to give listeners fear and anxiety.
Methods
I recorded using an H3N Aambisonic recorder and rendered in 4-channel and FOA format, binaural decoder was used to decode. After doing the field recording in the MTR station, I processed and edited the recording.
For the editing part, I used various IEM plugins to create sound effects. The Plugin of FdnReverb is used for reverberating a sense of space, the dialogue and the walking sound, it extends the silence and the big size of the MTR station. To create feelings of illusion, I used a plugin of DualDelay in knife sharpening part in delaying effect.
While MultiEQ is used for raising the noise and spatializing, Omni Compressor compresses and reduces the unnecessary noise. The pitches of sounds are adjusted to create the effects of distortion. The evil talking sound, including the MTR system voice and the walkie-talkie sound, their pitches are lower or higher. The playback rate is also increased or decreased to strengthen the weirdness.
Explanation
In the recording, most of the edited sounds are abstract and distorted. To present the thrilling feelings that “evil” and “supernatural things” give, I referred to the sound effects in the horror film Silent Hills. “There is an essential ambiguity to such sounds. In psychological terms, such sounds are perceived as a potential threat in that they hang in uncertainty for the perceiver” (Donelly, 2016, p.76). The vague, unknown and unexplained are the key elements in the audio to make listeners feel fear. For instance, the voice of evil is from a staff talking voice from a walkie-talkie talkie after editing, listeners may recognize it as “spoken words”, like a sentence. Yet, the slow speed, repeated and twisted note of sound brings uncertainty and creepiness, listeners would realize the unfamiliar sounds are from an evil or a monster.
Locations / Sound record
• MTR stations (including Kowloon Tong Station, Prince Edward Station, Whampoa Station)
• Train driving
• Pressing escalator’s button and system sound
• Passengers’ talking sound
• system sound
• Staff’s voice from walkie talkie (evil voice)
• Spinning the tip of a glass of water (tinnitus sound)
• Knife sharpening
• Footsteps
• Talking (dialogue)
• Sending voice message in WhatsApp system sound
Reference
Donnelly, K. J. (2016). Emotional sound effects and metal machine music: Soundworlds in silent hill games and films. The Palgrave Handbook of Sound Design and Music in Screen Media, 73-88. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51680-0_6
Kisaragi Station urban legend: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kisaragi_Station