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 .