Presenting and Feeding Back on Experimental Audio Projects

On Thursday the 3rd of November we presented out projects to the rest of the seminar class. Each pair went up and played their piece twice while everyone else made feedback notes. Then people would ask questions and comment. I found it interesting listening back to other peoples work and comparing it to ours. I was very impressed by Aaron and Shaun's in particular. They had produced a disturbing soundtrack of a slaughter house. What impressed me most however was the creativity and resourcefulness of it. They had access to a relative's farm where they recorded the sounds of pigs. They used the sounds of wet cloths splattering on the floor and wet mops wiping to floor to very convincingly replicate the sounds of blood splattering and being mopped up. They also recorded a chainsaw which, when combined with the sounds of pigs squealing and blood splattering sounded extremely disturbing. 

When we received feedback for ours someone had thought that that sounds of birds at the beginning was someone dreaming before they woke up. We had actually put it in as a kind of establishing shot before they woke up. However I quite like the idea of it being in the characters dream. We were told our recordings were of a high quality. Someone also pointed out that the quick cuts in between sounds as they were getting ready to leave the house was similar to the films of Edgar Wright. 

In hindsight after listening to everyone elses projects I think that ours is a bit generic and I wish we had done something more original and creative. I was however pleased with the quality of the recordings. 

Producing Our Experimental Audio Project

I met Baily on Tuesday the 1st to record our sounds. Baily had been away the previous weekend and got some very clear recordings of birdsong and his dog panting. In terms of equipment, we were using Audio Technica AT8015 Rifle Microphone and a Zoom H5 with the X-Y stereo microphone attachment. The stereo mic would be useful for recording low key atmospheric sounds while the shotgun with its very narrow pick up pattern would prove useful for recording specific sounds with little background noise. We walked around town picking up lots of different sounds such as footsteps, cars and the Peace Gardens. We went to my accommodation to record the sounds of getting out of bed and getting ready. We finally went to the train station to record lots of train audio. We were slightly concerned about this as the station is private property and owned by East Midlands Trains, so we thought we might be asked to leave as we did not have permission. However no one seemed to mind, we just got a few funny looks when using the rifle mic. 

A photo of Baily recording a tree

We edited our audio the next day using Pro Tools in one of the Mac suites at the Harmer building. This was my first time using Pro Tools since a brief introduction to it a few weeks ago so I found it quite challenging. Compared to other audio sequencing software available I found this slightly tricky to use. For instance I've used Adobe Audition and Cubase before and they've both seemed a lot more user-friendly. Anyway after an hour or two of playing around with it we managed to get the hang of it. There was some low frequency wind noise in the recordings of footsteps. So I used the EQ editor the reduce the gain on frequencies below 100Hz. This managed to get rid of the wind noise. After exporting it we uploaded it to Soundcloud.

Here's the finished product: https://soundcloud.com/peter-simison/baily-pete-sound-project

Planning Our Experimental Audio Project

We have been assigned an experimental audio project. It has the be 3 minutes long and revolve around the idea of "Sense of Space". This seems like quite a general topic but a good way of guiding our thoughts into an idea. For this topic we were told to imagine different environments such as a busy street or a shopping centre and then focus in on particular sounds as if you had some kind of sound microphone. I am working in a pair with Baily.

I had an idea of someone walking from the countryside to the city centre. As the recording would go on you would hear their footsteps stepping over terrain as it changed through the different areas. I thought it would be a good way to express sense of space as the countryside would sound very open whereas the city would feel much more claustrophobic and loud. When I met Baily to exchange ideas he had come up with the idea of someone waking up and being late for something. He thought of them perhaps walking towards the train station and progressively getting faster throughout the piece.

We decided to tie our ideas together and come up with a fusion of the two. Someone would wake up late and start walking towards the train station while going through different types of environments as they went. Their footsteps would get faster as they became more panicked. They would reach the train station at the end and it would sound very loud and claustrophobic. 

We decided to meet up on Tuesday the 1st to record the sounds.