Tag Archives: feedback

Sound Feedback

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After watching all our Project Brief 3’s in class, the main criticism for almost all the videos was sound. Often, the background music was too loud, or the audio was just recorder poorly.

The consensus was that more thought needed to be put in on where to record (apparently cars are excellent places for recording sound). In a live room, sound bounces off everything, like rooms with lots of hard surfaces, which is why big old churches are so echo-y and it’s hard to hear your friends in you resident white tiled and concrete floored hipster cafe. In rooms like the one in which our workshop is held are designed to reduce reflected sound and thus be better for recording. Fun things like carpet and acoustic panels (pictured above) can help absorb sound.

I know that the audio in my PB3 is very mediocre, due to recording most of it on a DSLR without a separate microphone. Recording better audio will be important especially in the upcoming audio essay for PB4 so these it will be crucial to keep these issues in mind.

Review of reviews

In my Media 1 seminar we discussed our reflective portraits in groups. After some difficulty with missing cables and confusing audio jacks, we got started. Except, there was a twist: we were to use Edward de Bono’s ‘six thinking hats’ to give feedback to our fellow group members. To simplify things, only four of the ‘hats’ were to be used:

Yellow = positive

Green = alternatives, creative, new ideas

Red = gut reaction

Black = something that doesn’t work.

This process, however, began with a rocky start and never felt comfortable to our group. Perhaps it is meant to be somewhat uncomfortable, to put one out of one’s comfort zone in an attempt to foster new ideas. One challenge was that each group member was charged with a specific ‘hat’, which created some conflict if, for example, a person with the ‘green hat’ wanted to mention something that didn’t work. I think this thinking strategy would work better as a guideline rather than a hard and fast rule. From my understanding, this thinking process is intended as an indirect and creative approach, but in the way we applied it, it felt rather limiting.