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.

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.

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.