I promised yesterday to make up for Friday’s missing post with an extra post today about Thursday’s tute, so here it is. On Thursday, we were looking at the technical side of sound recording.

Anything you can hear on a recorded piece of media can be categorised as one of the following: music, speech, sound (eg. footsteps, birdsong) and noise (unintended music, speech or sound). As Rachel (my tutor, in case I hadn’t mentioned it) pointed out to us, you can shut your eyes but you can’t shut your ears, so sound is a really integral part of a media piece in terms of engaging the viewer/listener and setting a tone.

Thus, it’s obviously pretty important to ensure that you create good sound, and while a well-loved media saying is “we’ll fix it in post”, you make it easier for yourself when you record high-quality sound in the first place. Rachel was keen to emphasise that just from listening to a recorded sound, you (and yes I mean you, not necessarily a media professional but an ordinary person too) can determine where a sound was recorded in relation to the microphone, how far away from the microphone the source was and what type of microphone was used.

So in true media student style we headed out, armed with a few nifty microphones from tech services, and recorded our own sounds. We had a big list of items to cover, from traffic to talking to taps, and then had to return to class to evaluate the quality of what we had recorded. Ali and I managed to get most of the things on our list, and I’d love to post them here but my internet’s gone a bit haywire so unless I want to sit here for five hours . . . (I don’t).

These are some of the questions we had to reflect on when we got back to class:

What problems did you encounter? Probably the biggest problem was recording the outside sounds, as there was an RUSU function on at Bowen Street that overpowered most of our sounds, creating a poor ‘signal-to-noise ratio’. Birdsong was particularly difficult to hear over the pounding festival-style music.

What were your most successful recordings? I think the train recording was particularly good, as you can clearly hear both the train announcer and the train itself, which I think gives it a really good sense of place and a story-like aspect.

What did you discover about mic techniques/setting levels? We were using an omni-directional microphone, meaning that we did not have to use the mic in a certain direction or anything like that, so it was actually fairly easy to use.