I met with Dylan again on 29th March, before this meeting I had not done much research or recording, because I did not know what I was looking for in terms of my research. In the tutorial, Dylan helped me through some of the questions I had.

The research areas in which I now need to research are Genre:- I need to decide whether it is an Experimental piece, as well as whether it is formalist or naturalistic – I also need to research to find out what these terms mean. I also need to research my subject, which will include taking photos of the route I will be taking through Lincoln. I will also need to research any legal or ethical issues with my recordings – most notably, any buskers that I might record on my way through Lincoln. I will also be doing some technical research, if I use any websites or YouTube videos to help me through the editing process of the soundscape, then I can use that and put that towards my research. Dylan also mentioned that I should research a budget of what I am going to be using because if I was not doing this for a university project and was hired to do this for a client, then I would need a budget, some of the items on the budget will need to include the price of a Zoom recorder, cost of the editing software, maybe train tickets, depending if I needed to travel to another city, and also my hourly rate for doing the job.

I didn’t meet Dylan again until 8^th March because I was trying to fix my problems with the files from London, and since it was not working, I had nothing to show Dylan, so I was waiting until I had something I could show him. However, I went to the tutorial and we spent a little time coming up with the idea in the tutorial, which was to record the sound of a walk through Lincoln, starting at St Catherine’s Roundabout and ending at the otherside of the hill, just past the Ermine Estate. We also watched the BBC video in Lincoln in which the residents of Lincoln overdubbed a Take That song and walked through the whole of Lincoln. My idea, is kind of the same as this video in that I will be walking through Lincoln with just a recording device and instead of a song playing, it will be a soundscape of Lincoln, ‘insert a picture of google maps of where I will be walking’ the walk will take around an hour, which means I plan to get around 15-20 minutes worth of recordings. I will also hope to speak to a few people around each part of Lincoln, some people at the bottom by the high street, some people up the hill by the cathedral and then some people over the other side of the hill by the Ermine Estate.

On the week commencing of 6^th 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.

After my meeting with David, he advised me that my tutor for this project would be Dylan. I met with Dylan on the 1^st 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.