Task 4 - Sound
- Maya Field
- May 8, 2021
- 3 min read
For task 4 we had to observe and analyse the soundscape of our own environment which for me was my Uni bedroom. We had to record the soundscape in a way that would give others a sense of the environment without them seeing the location.
"In our everyday life we get used to the sounds that surround us and we often overlook them. However, we are exposed to sound stimuli all the time (birds, microwave, wind, the heating, steps, cars, wind). We could even question what silence is and is there total silence –what about our own breathing, heartbeat and etc?" - Direct quote from the brief.
I started by writing down each sound element that I wanted to record in order to categorise them in to the correct times of day. My idea was for the sound scape to span a part of my day: opening the curtains and window, typing and writing (studying), standing up from desk and walking out of my room to the kitchen at the end. During this process I removed and added tracks to create the soundscape of my room.
Notes from my notebook of the sounds:
The individual sounds:
Arm on Desk
Breathing
Typing
Strong Typing
Typing and Mouse
Bathroom Fan
Curtains and Outdoors
Outside 2
Pipes
Footsteps
Hand noises
Doors shutting
Opening window
Chair rolling
Writing
Comp
Creaky chair
Closing window
The ordering of the sounds:
I then recorded each sound on my phone, using the default recorder I have on it. Some of the noises occured in the same track so, once I imported each track in to premier pro, I used the razor tool to split them up. I edited each clip so that the noise was the length I wanted and they didn't have unecessary noise like me starting and ending the recording. I had used Premier Pro before at College so I understood the basics of how to edit audio. There are other platforms for editing audio that I could have used instead - DaVinci for example.
It was 1 min and 4 secs long in the end. i experimented with slience within the piece too and the sound of my breath. I had left longer silence at the end but didn't like the effect so I shortened it. I layered the tracks (as seen below in the screenshots) in order to get full control of their volume rather than recording one long track of my room sounds. This meant that certain tracks run longer in the piece. So, whilst it's a recording of my room's soundscape, it's been heavily manipulated in post, meaning it's not something you'd actually hear in my room as all the different sounds don't tend to happen at the same time. All the recordings were done in my room though.
Initial order before I rearranged them in to the order I wanted:
Final screenshot before exporting it to a WMV file in Premier Pro:
Process - edit before the final sound bite:
Final Sound Bite of my Uni Room:
My phones recording app isn't great, there was fuzz in the background of each recording making it less clear. I could have and will research how to fix this in premier pro or, alternatively, I will find another app/ recording device for recording my interview for the project.
This task helped me think through questions about my interview project, things I need to test out before conducting the interview such as audio quality of recorded Zoom clips. If you can seperate the sound from zoom recordings to to edit. I will continue to use premier pro for the project as I am comforable using it and have access to it.
It took me sereval attempts to upload the sound bite successfully. I had exported it as an MP3 which wasn't compatible with Wix, but WMV was compatible in the end.
I am happy with how the sound bite turned out and actually enjoyed editing the tracks all together and layering it up to form the final piece.
Comments