Play and Sound- Listening Through The Day

Theme

Play and Sound

Method

I created a maze in UE4. The entrance and the exit are marked with glowing textures on the ground. I recorded different kinds of noises during my daily life and place them inside the maze. How those noises are placed is based on when they occurred in my daily life. For example, the sound of the morning alarm is placed closest to the entrance. Each sound effect gets louder when the player gets closer to it and vice versa. The maze is completely dark, so I have walk through the maze and use these noises to get to the entrance. In this project, the maze is the representation of ‘time in a ‘day’ and how I can live through a day using sound.

Context

The ideas is inspired by the game Dark Echo, which player needs to use the echo to move through the environment and detect where the enemies are.

There are two kinds of play. The first one is creative play; this occurs during the process of building the maze. Creative play is expressed when children use familiar materials in a new or unusual way, it allows children to explore, try out new ideas and use their imagination. In my response, I use sounds which I am familiar with to create a space that only I can understand but is still new to me, and the result can be quite unexpected- I struggled to reach the exit, even though I built them right before I started playing the game,

The second type of play is exploratory play, which involves people using all their senses. People examine objects by looking, touching (with hands and mouths), listening, and moving them to learn about how they can influence the world around them. This happens when I was playing in the maze, I uses my sense to navigate myself to the exit. The acoustic attenuation shows me the distance to the next target.

Response

https://youtu.be/qyeefoMV1f4 (Improved Version)

Reflection

The reflection could probably be better with more distinguishable sound effects. For example, the sound from the elevator and the sound of the street. However, adding more sound effects would make the maze harder to navigate. At first, I thought going through the maze can be quite easy since I am the one who build the maze. However, it was more difficult than I thought. I keep walking in the wrong direction, and it took me 4 minutes to get to the exit. 

Another thing I wanted to mention is the feedback Zipei Zhong gave me’ I think adding a little hint at the beginning can let first-time players know what you want to show'. In response to his advice, I should also point out that if I want to make this game playable for other players(which it was not designed to) it would require adding more text overlay in the game since not everyone knows my living habit. However, I think offer more description in the video would make the viewing experience better and this is why I decided to re-edit the video.

References

https://www.encourageplay.com/blog/16-different-types-of-play

https://www.pbs.org/wholechild/providers/play.html

https://www.nhsggc.org.uk/kids/life-skills/play-leisure/explorative-play/#:~:text=Exploratory%20play%20involves%20the%20child,sand%2C%20water%20and%20messy%20play.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_attenuation#:~:text=Acoustic%20attenuation%20is%20a%20measure,of%20energy%20caused%20by%20viscosity.