Week 5 (17/10) : 'The Spoken Word' Interview & Exercise

In this weeks class (17/10) we were introduced to the sound booths and live recording studio! It was really cool to be shown around the facilities as I had never encountered any spaces like this before, I'd only ever seen them in films or on TV. After being shown all the facilities and equipment we were asked to go out in pairs and conduct a short interview with someone on campus about a subject of our choice. Myself and Connor paired up and we decided that I would interview him about his job at the Globe student bar in Brighton. We went straight to the sound booths and we came up with about 5 or 6 questions that I could ask him as well as a short intro and outro to complete the interview. We recorded the interview a couple of times in order to give us a little bit of practice and allow us to get the perfect take so we weren't limited to just one. After this we took all the clips and put them into Adobe Audition and put a few effects on them to change our voices slightly so they sounded clearer and more effective, we also added in some intro and outro sounds to round the piece off.

The interview that I edited can be found here.

Week 3 (03/10) : Contact Microphone (& Hydrophone) Recording Session

During this weeks class we got to experiment with contact microphones and hydrophones. We were given a visual demonstration of how the kit works and how to set it up and in pairs/small groups we were given the microphones and asked to go out onto campus and experiment recording different sounds and see what sort of outcomes we could get from doing so. My group and I were lucky enough to be given one of the two hydrophones so we went straight to the stream of water that surrounds Falmer Square and tried it out. The sounds that we were able to get from the hydrophone were really entertaining as it really made you feel as though you were underwater and it was really cool that we were able to create that effect using the kit. Other sounds that we recorded included metal railings/wooden objects and the sounds created by tapping them, slinkies etc.

We then came back into class and experimented with different effects on all of the sound clips in Adobe Audition and mixed them into one long piece. We were able to reverse, loop, speed up/slow down the clips and the sounds that were created by using these simple effects was quite extraordinary! Unfortunately the export of my file corrupted and I lost my entire session so I was unable to post it onto my soundcloud.