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.

Today George and I met up to discuss our Soundscape. We realise that we have left this piece of work quite late due to other work needing to be completed. We have decided to record all of our sounds next week and then get started on editing them and putting the Soundscape together immediately after. We have created a structure for the piece, which hopefully we will be able to stick to without too many problems.

Our main worry is having to create the piece to go in time with a non-copyrighted piece of music that we are using briefly to create the visualisation that earphones are being put into the ears of our individual. We have worked out the tempo of the piece, so we should be alright when creating the Soundscape. If all goes to plan, this will be a successful and entertaining piece that students can relate to.

We met up about a week ago to make decisions about our soundscape. We decided that we would base our soundscape on an average day in the life of a student. This meant we had to take into account different parts of the day, such as waking up, getting ready,  going to lectures and getting home. We very quickly decided on ideas of sounds to record and agreed that we needed some form of rhythm to keep the soundscape flowing. This beat is likely to be a combination of a zip with a with an echo and also footsteps. We also thought it would be good to include the idea that the subjective person in the soundscape is temporarily listening to music through earphones whilst walking. We aim to do this by using a non-copyrighted piece of music which we will manipulate to sound as though the earphones are being inserted into and removed from their ears. This  will be achieved by adding a filter to cut off certain frequencies at different times. This will stop when the sound of the present crowd outside the lecture theatre overpowers the sound of the earphones being moved away from the person’s ears.

We’ve created a presentation which we feel explains the idea of our soundscape well, as well as proposing some of the sounds that we will use in the process of making the soundscape. It also gives an outline of recording locations, production tools and techniques, structure and our target audience that we are aiming to reach.

By George Burrows and Ben Hollick.