Sound Design

In my school task on Psychoacoustics I have been asked to make some modifications on a given noise sample. The task is to make some 6 different modifications to the given sample keeping in mind the design parameter , POWERFUL. And when I play the different modifications I have to ask the audience on how SHARP the sound is for them. The Spl has to be same for each level. I haven’t used Audacity before , so any help is appreciated .

I am sorry I misquoted the problem. The design parameter is sharpness and I have to ask the audience of how powerful they perceive the sound is …

That is tricky before we consider anything else.
There is no way to specify or set the SPL in an audio editor. The SPL depends not only on the signal but on the playback “system” (including the playback environment) and on how SPL is being measured.

What techniques have been suggested during your coursework?

This will give you real time measurements of Sound Pressure Level.

http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=12680845

You get to decide whether to use the “A” curve (sounds the same) or the “C” curve actually is the same. A takes into account human hearing.

You’ll have to do the measurements at the time of testing since it will change with the number of heavy winter overcoats and galoshes in the room.

I wonder if there is a dB/galosh standard…

POWERFUL.

That’s open ended, isn’t it? Anybody who’s been through an earthquake knows how powerful sounds that you can’t hear can be.

Powerful/Dense can be achieved through compression and distortion. I have a natural bias. I’d showing you powerful things on the screen and then it almost doesn’t matter what I do to the sound track.

Koz

Which will also increase the SPL (assuming all other factors remain the same).

But not necessarily. You can control for that. Distortion sounds loud. Koz

we are only supposed to alter one parameter like we take the narrow pass filter .Or we can change the sampling rate . I am not sure about it

See here: http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/index_of_effects_generators_and_analyzers.html#Change_the_quality_of_the_sound

Adding filters will cause controlled effects. Changing the sampling rate may cause complex, hard to quantify damage. I think I’d stay away from that one. Changing the accuracy of digital encoding can be more or less successful depending on who’s doing the resampling. Results can range from amazingly good to a blizzard of sampling artifacts.

Koz