This module has taught me a lot in terms of recording, organising and editing audio. It has allowed me to use my creativity when making our soundscape and differing it from other audio work. Practice in using recording equipment, such as the portable Zoom microphone and software such as Adobe Audition has been beneficial to me. I can now use this equipment comfortably and efficiently with what I want to work on.

When recording for our soundscape work both the group and myself were taught the importance of using the Zoom correctly. We learnt that to get the best audio possible we had to use pop shields to reduce and popping noise, and listen through headphones when recording. This is because the microphone does not always pick up exactly the sounds we hear ourselves. Another aspect of recording we had to be aware of is the level at which the microphone picks up audio. This is important because if the sound is too loud/quiet then it may not be a good quality to alter and edit in the box. Getting these basics right when recording allowed us to save us time in the later stages of editing and manipulating our soundscape. Adam carried out most of our recordings (with myself, Olie and Sean assisting him) and done a good job.

Something our group learnt from was organising our files properly, we had some small issues with the files we were using. We did not realise the importance of naming our audio files, and this would of saved us a lot of time when editing instead of searching and playing several files which was not the one we wanted. We faced more problems as Sean recorded some audio outside a club on his phone, however the audio was deleted unintentionally and was not backed up. This space in the soundscape was filled with some more audio we had and then manipulated, we are happy with the results. More audio files we had were also not backed up, but luckily had the exported piece we had used previously. From now on it’s safe to say we will back up files as a contingency plan and name files immediately

In terms of software the group decided to use Audition instead of Pro Tools as it is better for the editing and effects we used. It is also simpler, not in terms of the quality of work but by sequencing, more basic fading and volume adjusting (dB). We faced no problems using Audition and very much enjoyed editing this piece and being creative with it.

In conclusion, despite having small problems, our soundscape work was very successful and the group are very happy with the results. In hindsight, we could have been closer to the Cathedral when recording the bells, as they sound a little distant. Turning up an audio piece that is too quiet does not always sound good, plus a lot of background noise is picked up. We are happy with the outcome of our audio piece and think it is a very good listen.

Our soundscape was the day in the life of a student which meant a lot of sounds we would consider trivial and in un-important suddenly became the focus of our recordings both indoors and outdoors. This meant I had to learn a lot about using the equipment to get the best quality recordings before importing and manipulating them in the editing process. I did many of the recordings so the levels were very important. To begin with I had assumed that when using the outdoor and indoor microphones shield the level setting would be relatively straightforward: Lower the gains when outside and increase them for the quit sounds indoors but ti wasn’t quite like that. When we recorded different kitchen sounds and bedroom sounds I found that the pre-set levels needed to be adjusted much more often. Simply moving cutlery in an empty kitchen had enough sound to spike the meter and taking a plate out of the microwave also whereas trying to record sounds from a TV and a laptop with speakers which you would think would be pretty easily was actually extremely low on the meter and would never be as clear as I would like.

I have also learnt about the importance of using headphones with the recorder, whilst I had started the project with this habit already I was always making a mental note of how helpful it was in saving time from doing multiple takes at the time. Unwanted background noises could be detected before we had even started recording and the issue about setting levels was much simpler.

Overall I think the sounds I collected were of a high quality and sound good on playback. It’s also been quite interesting to see how when making a short piece of only 2 minutes the rule still applies that it’s better to have more audio to draw from than just getting two minutes worth of recordings. Especially since you need to remember that the listener can quickly become disinterested.

From the editing process I have seen how sounds can be manipulated to make them very different sounds to the one that we originally recorded. Not that I didn’t know already but being more subtle with the effects can make a bigger different then just simply throwing in effects and see how they sound.

In all I think I’ve learnt that making audio is a very precise process, you have the idea and you need to plan ahead what you will be doing in each stage but you can be very creative when you take into account all of the factors like location recordings and what you want to achieve .

Producing a soundscape piece has taught me lots of different things. One of the main lessons I have learned is how essential it is to have an assistant when recording sounds. Though it’s possible, it simply isn’t a good idea to attempt to record sounds on your own. It’s important to have someone on hand operating the microphone or recorder; monitoring the levels, choosing the appropriate distance and choosing the appropriate equipment to use: using a windshield etc. Adam in our group operated the microphone for pretty much all of the recordings and did a very good job.

The next main lesson I learned personally was file organisation. Work on the soundscape was very “on and off” as a group. Seeing as the other modules had earlier hand in dates, most of us prioritised working on those instead. However, in the last week when we all decided to meet up and edit the soundscape more, I realised I hadn’t copied all of the recordings to my memory stick correctly and as a result, we were missing all the sounds used in the first 30 seconds of the piece. Luckily we had an export of the first 30 seconds that we had edited and were able to use that in place of the missing sounds. Although it sounded fine, it wasn’t very practical.

Carrying on about file organisation, I had recorded a few sounds on my phone, such as: inside and outside a club and being sat in a lecture theatre, as I didn’t want to risk damaging the Zoom microphones. About a month after the recordings were made however, I started to have problems with my phone and had to perform a factory reset on it, forgetting to back up the recordings I had made. The files were completely lost. We did however manage to work around it.

Seeing as we weren’t going to be doing much in the way of manipulating the sounds, we agreed that Audition would be the easiest program to use instead of Pro Tools. I learnt a lot about the different features it has and seeing as most of the editing was done by me, I can now use Audition really quickly and easily. As mentioned earlier, microphone distance was another key area I learned; we found it difficult to record the cathedral bells (on the quarter hour) because they were very quiet in comparison to the surroundings. We could’ve tried recording them from the inside, and we should’ve recorded them standing right underneath the cathedral, rather than standing about 30ft away like we were.

So in conclusion, I have learnt a lot about recording techniques, editing skills in Audition and have also learnt the hard way to be a lot more organised with files. Overall, organisation would have to be a definite improvement for next time, not just with files but also with the Soundscape overall. There were a few times we were disorganised as a group but it didn’t really cause any major problems.

During the process of our Soundscape, I learnt a number of things, from actually doing the recordings to the editing stages.

Firstly I learnt about microphone placement – obviously I knew the importance of microphone placement for band recording set ups, but I didn’t know about the live sound effect microphone placement because I had never done anything like that before. I learnt the importance of space within the microphone placement – different to a studio setup because if it sounds too quiet because it’s far away you can just turn up the gain – but with this you must make sure that you are close enough so you can pick up what you want to record as well as being far enough away that you don’t peak the recording. As well as microphone placement, I also learnt that no two takes of the same recording is the same when it comes to recording live sounds, I already knew this for studio recordings, but you can almost guarantee the same outcome with a studio recording, but when recording live sounds, you will never get the same outcome twice, so sometimes you might record something, not think it’s very good and record it again, and then realise that the first recording is actually better.

As well as learning more about the recording process, I also learnt about the editing process, how cutting certain tracks in certain places helps with the dynamics of the certain soundscape and can change the outlook of the soundscape. As well as this, using subtle reverb on certain parts of the soundscape can add extra layers that would otherwise only get from recording more sounds and adding them into the soundscape. Also using the time stretching tool – before the soundscape work I had never looked at using this tool – the time stretching tool I felt was vital in making our soundscape what it was, because it added another dimension, that was needed from time stretching because you can slow sounds down using it, so especially recordings that was repetitive such as our recording of the train tracks. The fact that we got to slow these down and then speed them up was vital for our soundscape because it helped us create a motif that meant listeners could follow along and the audience would realise that the piece was either building up to something or slowing down to something, rather than just a bunch of sounds put into an order with no real reasoning behind why they went in that order.

For the past few weeks, we have been in the editing process; when editing our soundscape we have used a number of different techniques, these have included: time stretching, looping and reverb. Using the Time Stretching tool proved effective because it added another layer to our soundscape that could not be achieved by just recording more sounds, as well as this we also used a lot of cutting to make the sounds feel like they had an abrupt ending. As well as this, we also managed to get some more phone recordings that we had lost from the previous week.