Whilst working on this Soundscape, I have learned many things. Some things not even related to Audio Production, but to life in general, which is that it is hard to work as a group at times. A lot of the time you just want to get on with your own thing, but working as a group can be quite fun and satisfying overall, when you have something to show for it. One thing that I have learned about Audio Production is that a condenser microphone is extremely useful. Our Soundscape required us to record some relatively quiet sounds, which the condenser picked up perfectly. Even the sound of tying a shoelace came out pretty well, but we did not use it in our final mix.

Another thing that this project has taught me is not to put your faith in audio equipment. It breaks… a lot. I have spoken about our struggle with the Marantz Recorder in previous blog entries, but I have not talked about how the Marantz breaking actually helped me to realise that you need to be prepared if something does go wrong, and you need to make sure that you have enough time to rectify whatever went wrong. In the case of the Marantz, it broke on multiple occasions, but luckily we recorded early enough to book equipment out the next day (and the day after that… and the one after that) and get the rest of our sounds recorded.

I have also learned that when working on a Soundscape, if you have a plan then after recording the sounds, putting them together is a rather quick process. I was worried that when we got to editing it would take ages and we would get to what we thought was the end and find out that we still have to fill up another 30 seconds… but that didn’t happen luckily. We put the whole Soundscape together over the weekend. Obviously there will be small things to change still, but we are pretty happy with the outcome already.

One final thing that I have learned about Audio Production is that it is fun! I knew I would enjoy certain aspects when I signed up for it, otherwise I would not have undertaken a three-year course in it. What I mean is that there are always certain parts of a subject that you are less interested in and turn your nose up at when you hear about them, and creating a Soundscape was one of the things that I turned my nose up at. I couldn’t have been more wrong about it. Once we had come up with our idea, recording the sounds and then putting the whole thing together was much more interesting than I thought it would be, and it was a lot of fun too.