In this week’s workshop, we conducted a recording exercise in pairs using a Zoom H2N Audio Recorder. We conducted an informal interview at the basketball courts to get a feel of the environment we were in. Though you could hear other sounds in the background, such as cars driving by, people talking, basketballs bouncing and construction, you can still hear our voices pretty clearly. We then recorded my partner ordering coffee as a way for a participant interacting with the environment around. We also recorded the atmosphere at Building 80 of RMIT University where there are usually many students coming in and out of class, as well as ordering coffee from the shop inside and the trams passing by directly outside the building.

I think that something we had trouble with was finding a quiet place to record. Even places that you might think are really quiet, such as study spaces or empty hallways, would still have the faint sounds around that would be picked up by the recorder. We ended up recording back in our classroom, and despite the sound of the air conditioner and soft talking by others also inside, it was the quietest we can get. In terms of microphone techniques, I guess the best way to get a really good recording of someone talking is to really get the microphone up close and personal. We had the settings in pretty good levels, with the mic gain at 7 and the sound of our voices usually falling between the -12 to -6 dB range.

We then needed to edit these recordings in Adobe Audition. I have never used this program before so I was very confused when I first opened it and where to even begin. After watching some tutorials online, I was still somewhat confused on how to use it so my edit is pretty much the result of me clicking on random icons and effects and literally just going with the flow. I mostly used the noise reduction filter for majority of the clips and clicked on other filters here and there. It’s pretty clear that I still have a long way to go with using Audition and I will definitely look into how to better edit these audio recordings down the track.