Project by Jimmy Mäkinen and Oscar Nyman
Abstract For the final project in the course Sound in Interaction, we designed two synthesized soundtracks for a short clip taken from the 1954 feature film Tobor the Great. The film clipdepicts a robot taking its first steps in a laboratory milieu in the presence of two scientists. The objective for us was to create two different soundtracks representing two different eras, realities, and ideals; the bygone past, and that of the future as we envision it, by using the same tools to create both soundtracks. The sound effects for the two soundtracks were created through the use of the visual programming language Max, wherein we made use of digital synthesizers to create suitable sounds which were then further edited, mixed and synchronized to the film clip in a video editor. As a way to add an interactive component to the playback of the video clip and the two soundtracks, we created a program in Max with a user interface where the user can watch the film clip and change the varying parameters within the soundtracks, in real time, as a way to get an immediate sense of how the two different visions differ.