Link to What’s in my bag

The sixth class exercise has two main purposes: first, to get familiar with the specialised recorder Zoom H4n; second, to practice the recording skill in a conversation. 

In the previous studios, Zoom H4n had been introduced for several times. It is a handy and comparatively easy to use equipment which fits different recording situation. Once I used it for a vox pop so the interviewer is able to operate the recorder by him/herself while asking questions. This exercise is similar to the interview exercise we did before. Two people will speak alternately, or sometimes will speak at the same time, which requires the mic operator to pay full attention to catching both their voices.

In this class, we used the directional microphone to attach to the H4n. The directional mic is good at pinpointing the exact audio, but it is more difficult for the operator to catch two voices correctly. Moreover, this ‘interview’ is quite casual so the timing that the interviewer interjects a comment is unpredictable. The mic operator may be not able to quickly shift between the two speakers. 

Our group’s recording does have this problem. Ramsay’s voice is loud and clear while my voice (as the interviewer) can be barely heard. The mic operator still did a proper work to stay at the back side of Ramsay because he would definitely talk a lot more than I would, and his words were the relatively meaningful content. 

As a result, I tried to make improvements through editing. I came up with an idea: how about to combine the original sound track from the camera with the one from the microphone? The camera was closer to me than the microphone that the volume of my voice was a bit higher. However, I found it hard to realise. Our conversation is very compact which is difficult to cut between Ramsay and I. Also, the original sound track has the louder environmental noise that sounds very different to the microphone one. The possible solution that we can use for the next time may be to use two recorders: one for the interviewee and one for the interviewer to hold by him/herself. 

One more thought from editing the piece: Atmosphere sound really works. Ramsay put on his shirt in the video which in my opinion takes too much time, so I tried to speed up this clip. However, I still wanted to keep his sentence at the normal speed. Finally, I connected that single sentence with the atoms sound to match the duration.