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.