Notes After First Crit

The main thing we took from the crit of our audio only piece is that it felt too bare. The concept didn't come across as well as we had liked, and it sounded a lot more raw than the expected. I think this partly came through the fact we listened to it on actual speakers and not on headphones, and consequently it wasn't such an immersive experience, detracting from our piece more than I expected it to.

As a result we are going to restart the project from scratch and make it busier. By that I mean we won't have as many periods where it's just the background atoms track rather we're going to try to have more sounds interplaying with one another. However they aren't going to exactly fit together, we don't want to make them flow perfectly, the plan is to get a feeling of unease within the listener, since not understanding your sense of place would be a very uneasy and unpleasant experience. As a result we hope to make all these unpleasant sounds interplay well to work as a piece but be unpleasant for the listeners.

It was helpful hearing Debbie's point of view too and from her advice we will put more unpleasant sounds in it to really make it stand out. To do this I think we will have to abandon our initial plan of only using sounds from the locations, and instead find nasty sounds from other locations and maybe make them sound more like they were from the places we visited through reverb and EQ. Whereas this may change the idea of authenticity we were trying to stick to, in the long run it will make the piece sound better and help get across our idea more clearly; this is good because we could use any help we can get to make it more obvious since it's quite a complex concept to convey.

Results of First Edit

 Here are the notes from mine and Elliot's first audio edit on ProTools. The notes themselves are pretty self explanatory, I think as a first rough draft it works well and it makes it very clear what we need to do to further our ideas. It came across as more challenging than I expected, since trying to get across the sound and 'feel' of a building is quite challenging when it has to be made involving and immersive.

A lot of the things we did to try and make it a more engaging piece is through the use of effects such as reverb, to try and make the sounds seem different and more audibly interesting without trying to overuse them. We have also had multiple bits in which we pan the sound from one side to another, hereby making it sound like its going from the listeners left ear to their right. One example of this which works very well is of a spray paint can, the effect is very engaging and when we showed it to people it was the one of the aspects they picked up on most. This gives the impression of being stood in these places quite well, so is beneficiary to the piece.

In the piece we have tried  to make it flow but still feel disjointed, so that it will work as a piece of sound that people won't just get bored at, but rather while listening it will give them a feeling of discomfort. We've done this by repeating sounds randomly, and at one point a sound comes in with a beat to it but it just drops away without any prompts. This we felt this was our best way of achieving feeling of 'lacking a sense of place' by having a variety of sounds that have no place being where they are in the audio track but compiling with one another to get a sense of atmosphere.
I think one of the best ways we did this is at the end where we bring in one of the train sounds we get and hold the sound as it builds to almost a crescendo, but before it really grows to the highest point that you would expect it to it cuts out and the track ends. By doing this the intention was that it catches the listener by surprise and leaves them sitting there in a feeling of unease and surprise at it ending at this point.

We already have to go and re-record some of our sounds as they didn't come out as clearly as we would have liked them to on the edit, and we could do with a few more sounds in general to bulk it out and fill it in a bit more, so it doesn't come across to sparse or too subtle to the point of boredom in the listener.

First Visit to Park Hill Flats

 For our next sound visit we went to Park Hill flats, a largely abandoned flat complex. The difference with this place is that it is much more open, and has a feeling of a grander scale to it. Since it is more open the sounds we recorded don't have the same eerie ambient feel to the ones done in the warehouse. This I think will help us if anything, as I think to get across a feeling of lacking sense of place some elements of the soundtrack will need to seem as if they lack a sense of place themselves. If there is sounds from two slightly different places then they wont quite fit perfectly consequently fulfilling the feeling we're trying to get across.

One of the interesting things about here is that its not completely secluded, it is well within the city and and a handful of people still live there, this made it interesting in the fact that it hasn't entirely lost its sense of place but it could be said it's in the process of it. Something even harder to try and represent through audio but interesting to think about nonetheless.

Again here we used a Zoom mic, and since we had already seen photos of the place we didn't think it would be necessary to bring a contact mic. In this location we focussed on a bit longer sounds as we planned, so we have sounds of branches being dragged across various surfaces and things like footsteps through long grass. We also left a lot of the sounds to resonate for longer and fade out, in the warehouse there was a lot more just throwing bricks at discarded objects there, but here we left the sounds for longer to see how they disappeared.

After visiting this place with the sounds we have accumulated over the two locations our idea has become quite solidified to being the idea of using locations that have gone through a loss of sense of place. I think the fact we're only going to be using sounds from the locations it adds a level of authenticity to the piece, and hopefully will help it feel more immersive in the long run.

First Sound Visit To Warehouse

 Here are some of the images from our first visit to the abandoned warehouse. The visit was very successful we cam out with a plethora of good sounds, since it is so open there is a very eerie feel to some of the recordings too, with slight echoes being picked up from any sense of movement. One thing we'll have to do on our next visit is take a contact mic, since there is a lot of areas that have large metal panels and furthermore there is plenty of different and strange surfaces around that could've created some really bizarre and obscure sounds.

However we just mainly used a Zoom recorder because that's what we were both most experienced with. It worked well for what we needed it for, we mainly took stereo recordings since we thought if we can integrate different things into different ears then ultimately it would make for a more immersive experience as you would feel like you are in one spot with things happening around you.

The location was perfect for the feeling we were trying to get across since just being in there it gave a great sense of unease and like this was not a place that had sense of reason to be there, due to it having been vandalised so much. As a result this will probably end up being a place to definitely consider shooting the visual part of the project as it almost epitomises the theme we're going with.

At our next location we need to get more long sounds, and long atmos tracks that will be able to run in the background of our piece so that there is always something going on in it. Here we got a lot of short sounds, such as bricks being thrown at things, cans being kicked, glass being thrown etc. But to make the track better I think we need more than what we just got here, for it to last three minutes well. Since the setting is so big we only had enough time to explore the main areas thoroughly but the sounds we got here I think get across the aura of the place well nonetheless.

First Meeting Discussing Audio Project Ideas

These are my notes after our first meeting with Lee to discuss our audio only project. We clarified that our theme for the piece would be to try and get across the feeling of a 'lack of sense of place' which is quite a challenging concept to decide to get across purely through audio.

The initial ideas we came up with are to try and counter sounds against one another, for example establishing a few sounds from one location then pushing another sound in that makes no sense thus throwing the listener off balance at the random part that doesn't seem to have any sense of being there.

Another idea we discussed was the idea of community and the lack of belonging to a community, we could achieve this a very similar way to the first idea but counter two communities such as the cheers and roars of football supporters with the calmness and stillness of a church congregations, both strong communities, both with distinctive sounds and they both cross over with each other in quite a few ways.

The final idea we discussed was the plan to record sounds at buildings and locations that themselves had become derelict and abandoned, therefore losing their own sense of place and exploit the available sounds that we can find in those locations. The two locations we came up with that are abandoned are Park Hill flats that are largely abandoned and unused now and an abandoned warehouse near Tesco.

I think now the idea is clearly established we can experiment with these ideas to see which one comes across best when we make rough edits.