One of the first things we learnt how to use was the Marantz/Zoom portable recorders. These were helpful in making our soundscape as we could take them out whenever we wanted and pick up natural sounds of the world with them.  Our theme was the day in the life of a university student so it was mainly common sounds that we used, such as a kettle boiling and toaster popping to signify the morning has started. The start of the soundscape is the sound of an alarm clock ringing which gradually gets louder and faster. I also copied the recording and put it in reverse to have the constant ringing of the alarm clock sound that we all hate in the morning. We edited this on Adobe audition to run throughout the first minute, showing that the student has gone back to sleep and/or is never really awake. The student makes groaning noises as he can’t be bothered to get up or start the day. Using Audition was useful as well as we could manipulate sounds with effects to emphasise them or muffle them. An example of this comes in at around a minute in. We hear the lecturer talking and to show that the student is bored and falling we asleep we applied an echo and chorus effect which eventually blurs the voice entirely. This represents the student being bored in a lecture and we then placed in the sound of snoring, showing they’ve fallen asleep in the lecture.

We then cut to the sound of a concert, to show that the student is dreaming of being somewhere else. Adam actually went to a concert during  the run of this course and so he recorded the sounds on his phone. This included the support band warming up and a vendor selling food. We deepened the concert sound by EQing the sound source, bringing out the low end frequencies to give that deep, pulsing feel we have at concerts. Once we finish this section we hear footsteps walking through gravel. The student starts off at a regular pace but becomes more uneven and wobbly as time goes on. We then hear him clambering up the stairs, showing that he’s inebriated from his night out. He tries to put his key in the door, which takes several attempts and crashes loudly into his flat. Whilst we were recording this one of Mark’s flatmates was heard in the background saying ‘What are you doing?’. We thought this would work quite well in the narrative so once the door slams we placed this piece of dialogue at the end and looped it to echo in the last few seconds, bringing an end to the students night and our soundscape. A phaser effect was also added to this end piece to make it sound more swirly and for the stereo effect to represent being drunk and wobbly.

Overall the soundscape was fun to record and edit. We worked well as a group and shared the work evenly. We had fun creating the narrative as it was something we could relate to and created a good piece of work in my opinion.

From this module I have learnt about many aspects of creative audio production. Firstly I learnt what a soundscape was, and to define it I would say that it is a way to express an idea through the use of different sounds, in a way which portrays this concept. In our production we have created the typical day of a student, we start in the morning where they are just getting up, the alarm is buzzing, it keeps growing louder and louder. The morning routine then starts in the characters room. We recorded a range of different sounds in the bedroom to be able to build this sonic piece which would show our idea. Other places we recorded were in the kitchen, bathroom, and outside. I also did a special recording from the LG arena in Birmingham for the evening part of the piece.

Throughout this process I have learned how to use a Marantz recorded to capture our sounds. Halfway through the process this changed as our equipment was replaced to a H4n Zoom, these were so much better for recording as it comes equipped with dual microphones, which the angles could be adjusted between 90 and 180 degrees.

Throughout the process I have been doing a portion of the editing of the piece. Firstly I would do a test piece on Adobe Audition, just to gain an insight to what I wanted to do with the piece. We would then review it as a group and then go onto pro tools and edit it fully on there.

From this production I have learnt quite a few things around pro tools and being a previous cubase user I can say that for this type of work I feel that pro tools has been very useful, mainly because of its great audio editing interface and the wide range of effects which can be added onto the different pieces of audio. An example of an editing techniques I have used would be shuffle mode, this was used when editing pieces of audio to make them shorted but keep them clean (no clicks) it aligned them straight away and I could tell where a wave peaked and dipped so I could join them together avoiding these clicks.

In the afternoon part we had someone talking like a lecturer, I then used chorus to give a deeper sound, reverb to add more depth to this and then I used distortion to make the voice unrecognisable, along with a frequency shifter, giving this same effect.

When joining the morning, afternoon and evening together I had to use crossfades to neatly join the parts together, meaning one piece didn’t stop and then wait for the next to start.

This was the day of the final mix, we created a piece for the evening and afternoon session, we decided that the afternoon should be a short aspect of the piece and the evening is almost like a day dream to the character at hand. We blend out from the voice by using distortion, chorus and reverb.

The evening was made from my recording which I did at the concert, in the main atrium area of the LG arena there was a good range of ambient sounds, we then took out the high end of the recording and removed some of the bottom end. This gave a more hollow sound as if you were listening to this piece from above a nightclub.

We then blended the two sessions together and made the final piece.

I found that from this session I learned a lot in terms of mixing and other techniques to do with pro tools, such as using shuffle mode to snap the audio together when taking out chunks, without making the audio jump or click. To make sure this didn’t happen I cut at the zero point on the wave form and then joined it back when the phase shifted up.

Now that we’ve recorded the basis for our morning section, we need to edit down our pieces to make a clear “narrative”. This will also include manipulating our audio piece to sound more exaggerated signifying the morning routine of the typical students. The morning section is supposed to highlight the tiredness of the student and merge into the night time to show the repetitiveness of the routine. The sounds may not show this clearly at first but it will become more apparent as the piece goes on.

Now we just need to record the night section and then put that into the mix to finish our narrative and and sense to the piece. Once we’ve recorded the sounds we’ll need to edit them down to keep within the 2 minute time limit.