Bad Day at the Beach

The assignment “emotions through sound” (3 pts) was harder than I expected. I wanted to do this assignment because I know that different sounds can make me feel happy or sad, and I wanted to play around with sound effects more. At first, I was positive that I would create a relaxing sound by using four sound effects, but the more noise I added, the less relaxing it got. I was going to convey a relaxing day at the beach, with nice ocean waves, but I found out that oceans are noisy and I find noisy stressful. Therefore, I changed gears and decided to create a stressful or anxious sound. I kept the original idea of having the ocean in the background, but this time I added noises that stress me out that have to do with the beach. Before you can relax on the beach, you have to deal with so much stress! This is what stresses me out about going to the beach:

I used four different sounds to create this stress/anxiety: “ocean waves” by darren1979, “traffic horns city nervous busy” by klankbeeld (cars honking at each other), “flock of seagulls” by justkiddink, and “baby crying” by panikko. All of these sounds are from freesound.org. I kept the noise of the ocean in the mix because it is a reminder of how nice it would be to be at the ocean instead of stuck in traffic. I imagine the scene when you are about a block away from the ocean and can smell it and hear it, but you can’t get there yet. This tantalizing sound only leads to an increase in anxiety for me, because I just want to be there already!! Traffic noises are pretty universally stressful, because nobody likes being in traffic (especially the weekend beach traffic that you inevitably get stuck in). After I had these two sounds down, I didn’t know what to add next. I thought about what I didn’t like about the beach (which is not much because I LOVE the beach), and I thought: seagulls! Seagulls steal your food, they are loud and obnoxious, and they are completely unafraid of humans. They stress me out because they are so annoying. After that, I added a baby crying because I do not know how to stop them from crying, and they have such powerful lungs. I imagine that I am almost to the beach, when traffic just comes to a standstill, and the baby suddenly starts crying. What do you do? Stress out, that’s what. In this way, a pleasant trip to the beach can actually be incredibly stressful, and I hope this emotion comes out in the track (and I hope you don’t get too stressed out listening to it).