Month: November 2014

Our trip to Skegness was ill timed, and this unfortunately meant that we had to make some sweeping changes to our plans. We recorded on 20^th November, which in retrospect was far too late. Our soundscape had originally had elements of the fairground in it, but the fairground was closed for the winter, and we were unable to record as a result. The same could be said for several of the nostalgic seaside elements; summertime was over, and so the beach was pretty much empty. This was due to us not organising our time properly, and if we were to redo this, recording everything earlier would be the number one priority.

This has caused our soundscape to differ from the original brief somewhat, but we felt that the setting and transitions we had planned would still make for an interesting and engaging piece of audio. On the day of recording, I did quite a lot of it, as I was the one walking and recording footsteps. I used a pair of boots that produced a nice sharp clack on concrete, which contrasted nicely with the soft crunchy sound produced when walking through sand, as well as the thud when walking on carpeted arcade floor. When recording, I held the H4N towards my feet, and recorded in stereo, so left and right footsteps came through on different channels. When listened back to with headphones, it placed the listener right in the shoes of the subject, which is an artistic decision we decided upon when experimenting earlier in the term.

Audio was either recorded whilst I was walking, or as static clips. Much of the arcade was recorded this way, and we are going to use layering, fades, and panning to produce the effect of the subject walking past machines. The pier was also shut, but we managed to find some decking that wasn’t locked off, and so recorded footsteps on there, with the intention of adding wave and bird sounds, to bring the journey back round to the beginning. I liked the idea of the subject stopping and grabbing onto the guardrail to end the soundscape, and recorded several versions of this grab with the H4N.

Apart from several key features that were locked off to us, I think that the day was a productive one, and we returned to Lincoln in the evening confident that we had recorded good quality clips, that would all fit into a coherent soundscape.

To record the sounds for our soundscape, we took a day trip to Skegness. The equipment we took with us was a Zoom H4n recorder and a Mirantz recorder with external microphone. We chose to take both so we could get two people recording and the other two people within the team would create the noises. This would also be useful to get the perspective of the individual walking and collecting the external sounds.

Upon arrival we headed to the beach as it was the start of our soundscape and we wanted to capture the sounds in chronological order. When setting up the recorders for outside use (turning on and putting the outdoor, wind mufflers on) we tried doing some test recordings. To capture a stereo feel, we set the microphones built in the Zoom recorder to 120 degrees which would allow us to capture wider, ambient sounds.

Whilst setting up the Mirantz, We noticed that the Mirantz kept coming up with an error to do with the memory card so to try identify the problem, we switched the memory card form the zoom and put it in the Mirantz however, the error message kept appearing. We checked the memory cards had been formatted before use so this problem unfortunately eliminated the use of the Mirantz and external microphone. The main focus of our recording was to try to collect the footsteps as this was the main part of our soundscape which was going to be used for the transitions between each location.

To record the footsteps, Daniel held the zoom recorder pointing down at his feet to create a stereo feel whilst walking which would put the audience in the shoes of our character.