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.