Month: February 2017

Blog post 3

Oliver Michalitsianos Diary entries

On the week commencing of 6th February, I went down to London, I planned to do most of my London recordings on my iPhone, because I enjoyed the stylistic elements that it gave me, a sense of home recordings of home life, rather than the ‘professional’ sound I would get with using mics and recording equipment from Media Loans. I had a plan of what I wanted to record whilst I was in London, which I laid out in the last blog post, however, I also wanted to record some people having a conversation from my home town and some people talking in Lincoln so that in my piece there would be some different accents which would help people differentiate between my London life and my Lincoln life.  I spent the day travelling around London recording all the soundbites that I wanted to use, and it was rather successful.

However, when I got back to Lincoln and put all the sounds I had recorded from London onto my computer, none of them would play and the files were unfortunately corrupted. I spent about a week trying everything I could to try and get the back, I used my iMac, my MacBook, I used the iMacs in university, I tried my friends Apple computers as well as their Windows computers and nothing was working, so at this point I conceded and realised that the files would not be able to be recovered.

Blog Post 2

Oliver Michalitsianos Diary entries

After my meeting with David, he advised me that my tutor for this project would be Dylan. I met with Dylan on the 1st February and we set an outline of what I would need to record in both London and Lincoln. Dylan suggested that I should record some landmarks in both the cities.

I started by writing down some of the ‘must haves’ in my soundscape from both London and Lincoln. Most of the stuff in London would be landmarks, such as big ben and St Paul’s Cathedral but as well as this, there would be some more personal sound bites, such as a soundbite from fans of West Ham United –  the team I supported – as well as this I would also record the tube sounds of the tube station of where I lived. In Lincoln, there would be more generic recordings in place, because this is how I felt about Lincoln, I did not feel any personal affiliation with the city, so the soundbites would be the train lines, some swans, and the Cathedral. As well as these geographical landmarks, I would also record the hustle and bustle of the cities, because as you can imagine, one would be a lot different to the other, and I enjoyed the idea of the slower paced Lincoln life intertwining with the fast-paced London life throughout the soundscape.

 

Learning Objectives

Oliver Michalitsianos Diary entries, Research

My learning Objectives for this Project are:

 

1) Become more organised whilst working on this project.
For the last project, last semester, most of the work was left until the last minute and it was a mad rush to get all the work finished. My main concern for this project is I don’t want to leave all the work to the last minute again. I want to make sure all my recordings are done with plenty of time to edit and get uploaded, without feeling rushed towards the end of the deadline.

 

2) Become more competent whilst using Pro Tools.
This will be the first time I have done an Audio Project by myself, and therefore the first time I will be using Pro Tools by myself. I have a basic knowledge of how to use Pro Tools because of what I have learnt at University, however, I have always worked with someone on the assignments when using Pro Tools and therefore never really had to worry about my Pro Tools skill level until now.

 

3) Gain more knowledge in the area of sound that I am working in.
I’ve never done a soundscape before, I don’t know anything about how to plan a soundscape, nor about the equipment I need to use for a soundscape. I want to learn about this area, so when it comes to creating my soundscape, I have a better knowledge of how it all works.

Proposal

Oliver Michalitsianos Diary entries, Research

For my Soundscape, my idea is to have my two lives, intertwine but also battle for priority. What I mean by this is, my home life in Essex/East London and my University life in Lincoln. Whilst I am in Lincoln I feel like I’m being held back whilst I am here with how creative I can be, there’s only so much I can do whilst I am here and it is no where near as much as when I am in London. The creative freedom when I am in London makes me feel more free within creative either music or sounds. It even comes in to play when I go to watch live music, in Lincoln, there is only one decent music venue for live music, which I very much enjoy going to, however there isn’t live music on all the time in Lincoln. I love watching music and musicians do their thing, I enjoy watching how different musicians react to the audiences. In Lincoln this doesn’t happen enough for me. In London, there is live music on somewhere almost every night, there is more creative freedom in London, there’s more creative expression in London. So this is how both my lives contrast, it will very much be a frustration piece of how my two lives contrast and also how they connect. I will be looking for sounds that happen in both places, such as the live music, as well as the cathedral sounds; however I will also be recording sounds that contrast each other in both places, such as the train line sounds in Lincoln contrasting with the Tube sounds in London.