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.

One final time George and I booked out the horribly over-complicated Marantz and an AKG C3000 this morning in the aim to capture the sound of a crowd. Luckily we had a Mediation and Representation lecture at 11:00, which we stood outside of until a crowd gathered, and then hit record. We recorded one take outside the lecture, and another whilst walking into the lecture and sitting down.

Now that I’ve thought about it, the AKG C414 would have been a much better microphone to use, because it has an changeable polar pattern, meaning that we could have recorded using an omni-directional polar pattern, which would have let us capture a more full sound. However, the C414 was already booked out so we had to make do with the C3000, which did the job well enough for the purpose of a muffled crowd. We are going to use a muffled crowd sound to signify that the individual in the Soundscape has earphones, and the crowd will then get louder when he “takes his earphones out”. If we manage to achieve this, it should sound excellent!

Another day of recording. We booked out the Marantz Recorder one more time, thinking that it couldn’t fail us again. We were wrong. Even after formatting the damn thing there were still errors every five minutes. This resulted in George and I recording one or two sounds, then uploading them to a laptop, deleting the files on the SD Card and re-formatting it. We used an AKG C414 as the C3000 was already booked out. The sounds came out just as well, if not better, due to the hyper-cardioid setting on the C414.

Anyway, we managed to get all of the sounds that we wanted (minus the sound of a crowd outside a lecture theatre), and re-recorded the sounds that we somehow managed to delete on Friday. Some of the sounds that we recorded include: brushing teeth, footsteps, in-game sounds, text tones and pouring water. To capture these sounds generally George would create the sound whilst I set up the Marantz so that the gain was at the correct level, and then we would perform the sound and record it a few times in order to have different choices if one didn’t sound very good.

The recording went very well and we are now ready to edit our sounds with just over two weeks – more than enough time to get our Soundscape sounding spectacular.

Today George and I went out for a second recording session. Again, we booked out a Marantz Recorder and an AKG C3000 and went to George’s apartment to record. We recorded some of the sounds in our running order, however ran into another problem.

The Marantz Recorder came up with an “Error” sign after we had recorded about eight sounds, meaning that we had to stop the recording, take the sounds off of the SD Card, and take the Marantz back to Media Loans. We asked how to stop this the next time that we record, and apparently we have to format the SD Card in order to stop the error from occurring.

We also realised that we had somehow managed not to save the sounds that we had recorded on Friday, meaning that we will have to record them again tomorrow, in another recording session.

Today George and I started our recording for the Soundscape. We booked out a Marantz Recorder and an AKG C3000 – a large diaphragm condenser microphone set to a cardioid polar pattern – meaning that we could pick up the sounds that we needed to a good standard. For our presentation we recorded some sounds with a Shure SM58, however we decided to re-record those sounds to make sure that they are recorded as good and clearly as they can be.

We set out to get all of the recording done today so that we could then edit it all next week, however we ran into some trouble early on. The battery of the Marantz ran out almost immediately, despite them being replaced before we used the recorder, which cut the recording session short.

Some of the sounds that we managed to record included cooking bacon, an alarm clock, a kettle boiling, and pouring a drink. They were all recorded well with a high Signal-to-Noise Ratio.