This week’s exercise included running around campus pointing our trusty zoom recorders at things hoping to produce something resembling a ‘clean’ recording. The initial challenge was finding a suitable place to record the interview part without any background noise – seeing as quiet places in the CBD are hard to come by and there were 20 other students with the same idea. Once we’d find a suitable hideaway, however, another issue presented itself. Namely, how does this thing work? How far away do we hold it from the interviewee? How do we know if it is recording at the right volume?

The answers mostly consisted of ‘I don’t know, but let’s give it a shot.’ After listening to the interview recordings, I feel that the recorder should have been held closer to the interviewee to record clearer sound. Also, the spot where we recorded the interview was a bit too echo-y, and this affected the final recording.

We also had issues recording particular sound in public spaces, such as the noise of a tram, as there was too much background sound, and you can hardly tell the population of Melbourne to be quiet, please. The more successful recording is therefore the interview one, which was recorded in a comparatively more quiet space.

Bringing the sound clips into Audition was fairly straight forward after coming from learning Premiere the previous week. Although I had some what-am-I-doing moments, thanks to some trial and error this was quickly resolved. I layered a few different sounds to create the clip embedded below, trying to keep in mind the figure-ground-field technique. The figure in this clip is the interview, set against some ‘Melbourne’ sounds – casual chatter, music, and the dinging noise of a tram, that create the atmosphere. I had to move around the levels a lot in order to bring forward the interview recording, and I applied some fades to make it more smooth.