Last year, I took a course on Virtual Environments, or the way different cultures throughout the years allowed their minds to transcend reality in order to imagine otherworldly and illogical places. An example of this would be the Victorian era's Spiritualism craze, which focused on clearing the mind and focusing on one's mind in order to contact the 'otherside'. I focused on this idea for my final deliverable, and created a sound-design focused Unreal Engine project in order to showcase how audio stimulus helped to trick people into believing that seances and other methods that spirit mediums used were actually successful in their goal.

Immersive sound design has been a huge interest of mine over the years, and in this project I was able to lean heavily into that. This game was especially challenging, as each player occupied a different medium. One controlled a traditional, third-person Hero character, while the other used a VR headset to attack the other as a God. I had to take each perspective into account, and design each sound effect and music cue accordingly. Through this project, I was able to learn many things about the game design pipeline, and how creating audio fits into it.

As part of my curriculum in university, I had to take multiple design classes as a general requirement. During one of these courses focusing on unconventional art, I noticed that the sound design work I did for a group project was completely overlooked in critique, as though my peers didn't even notice it was there. Because of this, I made my final project solely a soundscape with minimal visuals, to allow people to open their minds to how much of a role sound plays in immersing the viewer in an experience.  This is a snippet of the project, but the full thing can be found here at 

https://maurahayes0622.wixsite.com/dsgn115final