During this week’s tutorial, we worked on a workshop exercise, which consisted of recording a series of sounds. We worked in a group of three, and initially when we got the microphone, we just couldn’t figure out how to use it. It took a while to even find the “ok” button, when sorting through menu options (apparently you just push the middle of the up/down button, but I personally think it should just be a button that says “ok”, there would be much less confusion). Luckily, Dan provided us with a “dummy’s guide” to the Zoom H2n, which helped us work through the basic operations on this foreign device.
We set the sensitivity level to 7, and decided to keep that for all of them, as see which ones it worked for, and write down whether it worked or not, which I believe was more effective then changing them on the spot.
The most successful recordings were the clips that were recorded indoors, in a quiet environment, with the subjects talking being relatively close to the device. These stood out because there was minimal echo or background noise, which didn’t distract from the vocals. They also stood out because they were very “clear” sounds, which had a good signal to noise ratio.
In order to find the most and least successful audio recordings, we created a table that summed up strengths and weaknesses of each clip, and whether or not they could be used or not, if we were in the situation to choose. Later I also made a video with samples of the clips that we recorded.