Self Reflection

First and foremost, I am proud of the work I produced, even though it was not my first choice of soundscape due to some complications, I feel I have produced a piece of work that I can be proud of, I also feel that it is a step up to any other work I have created using sounds and music, because of the skills I have learnt on the way to creating this.

LO1 – Become more organised whilst working on this project.

Now, this learning objective started great, I had meetings with David and Dylan almost immediately and tried to get the work underway straight away. With my original soundscape idea, I was already in London recording at the start of February, however that is where it went wrong. Once I had the problems with all my recordings, I had to basically start again and although I feel I was well organised throughout the second half of recording when I had a new project to focus on, it was the time in between which was the problem, I didn’t get started on the new project straight away and it took me 2 to 3 weeks before I realised that I needed to start the assignment again otherwise I was never going to finish.

LO2 – Become more competent whilst using Pro Tools

I feel that I have met this learning objective completely. As stated within my Learning Objectives, I said that this would be the first time I would be using Pro Tools by myself, and I feel that I have succeeded in becoming more competent and all around more confident whilst using Pro Tools. I no longer need someone looking over my shoulder whilst I use the program to make sure I am doing the work right.

LO3 – Gain more knowledge in the area of sound that I am working in

Again, I feel that I have met the criteria for this learning objective too. Before starting this project, I knew very little about soundscapes, how they worked, what genres they fell under, basically I did not know anything to do with the area of sound. But as you can see from the research I have done throughout the Blog with research on Genre and Pricing, you can see that I have now grasped an understanding on the genre of soundscapes, and even the different types of soundscapes – Experimental, Formalistic and Naturalistic.

If I were to do this project again, I would give myself more time to get the original idea done, rather than just planning to go down to London just the once I would make sure I planned to go there a few times, just in case something like the files corrupting happened again, so if I went a few more times I could have rerecorded what I had lost. As well as that I would make sure I stay in constant contact with my tutor. One of the biggest problems I faced whilst transitioning from my main idea to the idea I finished with is that it could have all happened two weeks earlier, had I just emailed Dylan about the problems quicker and we could have sorted it out earlier. The tutors are there to help you through problems like that, and I didn’t take advantage of the help enough.

Edit Session 3

Once I had finished placing all the sounds in the correct places within chronological order, and as well placing the sound of train line, the sound of the bells, and the sound of the woman’s voice throughout the piece, it was time to start adding some effects where I thought it would add to the experimental feel to the piece. I started with adding some Chorus to the sounds of the traffic, the reason I done this is because it gave it a smoother sound to the traffic going past. With the continuous sound of the train line, I added a plug-in called SansAmp, which is a harmonic, and the reason I did this is because I wanted to make sure the train line came piercing through, and almost be quite annoying, I added a lot of reverb to this too, to make it feel more spacious. For the Bells, I added a lot of reverb so they would resinate out, as well as adding some compression, to boost the sound of the bells. With the sound of the woman’s voice, I wanted it to have an eerie effect, so I added some delay and also a lot of reverb.

Edit Session 2

The second edit session was after my last meeting with Dylan, so I had some changes to make from the first piece, however, I carried on cutting down the soundscape, so it fit into a time frame I was comfortable with. My aim was to get it to 25 minutes. Whilst I was cutting down the piece and putting it in an order that made sense, I came across a piece of the recording which was of a woman saying to her son ‘You need to use your listening ears’ I felt that would work very well throughout my recording because, the main thing you do whilst the soundscape is listen, so I felt that it would be very good to have throughout my soundscape to remind people to keep listening. Once I finished editing down the soundscape, I finished with around 27 minutes, which is around where I wanted to be.

Blog Post 6

After having a final meeting with Dylan on Monday 24th April, we came to the conclusion that I should change my soundscape from a Naturalistic piece to an Experimental piece. The way I will set out to do this is by having the ‘down the hill’ section compete with the ‘up the hill’ part. I will use the Train line sounds as a metaphor for the ‘down the hill’ section and then have it cut through at different intervals throughout the piece. The idea is to have an ongoing narrative between the two parts of the piece, with the same kinds of sounds at the start of the piece and at the end.

Edit Session 1

In my first editing session, I only imported the first day’s recordings into Pro Tools, I felt it would be easier to work with only one day’s sessions at a time, that way I don’t get confused with any of the order of where the tracks need to be within the timeline of the walk through Lincoln. The last thing I want is for the sound of the cathedral bells being before the hustle and bustle of the high street. Whilst editing, I realised that a lot of my files were not at the same levels, so I spent a while automating the files, so that they were in line with each other, there’s obviously going to be parts where tracks are louder due to sounds such as cars going past, or a train going past, however, I tried to level out each track to when these things did happen, it was a nice dynamic change rather than a horrible sound that will make you want to turn it off.

After I automated the tracks, I then listened through and decided what I could cut out, and what I needed to keep to make sure that there were no unnecessary sounds that I had already covered in other sections of the soundscape. In the end, I managed to get the session down from 28 minutes’ worth of recording to 13 minutes of recording. Once I had cut down the recordings, and figured out what I wanted to keep in, I then lined all the tracks together and added fades and crossfades to make sure all the sounds ran into each other smoothly.