Mechanical Bird Sound First Draft
The first thing I did when constructing this sound was identify the different samples I could use. The sound was divided into three elements, natural, mechanical cog and Motor. I started by finding audio of a bird flapping its wings, this is what I would use as a blueprint to lay the mechanical sounds on top of. I tried to match the real sound source’s size to the fictional object’s size. The first mechanical sound I added was the sound of the cog pulling the wing down, for this I used layered camera shutters, because its a high velocity small mechanism. The second element of the mechanical bird was a motor, I imagined that a motor would be necessary for a mechanical system. The only motor that would fit in a mechanical would be a watch motor. These layered created a textured mechanical system to place under the natural sounds. In the interest of time I created a 6 flap loop, when I revisit this sound I will find more diverse samples and create a longer loop to make the sound more believable.
The natural sound provided the hardest problem when designing this sound. I found that recordings of real birds had a Doppler effect as the birds were always flying past the microphone, this was unusable for me as I needed a steady flapping. The only alternative was foley recordings I found in sound libraries, the drawback to this was they all had a very artificial quality to them. Another problem I experienced was determining the amount of low frequency that should be present in the flapping. From the perspective of a person the air displacement wouldn’t be that much, therefore there wouldn’t be a lot of low frequency in the sound. However, from the perspective of the bird there would be much more low frequency. The problem I face is that the amount of low frequency in the wing flap is an auditory signifier of the size of the bird, how do you express the size of the bird accurately?