First Recordings

This week we began the recording process of our soundscape.

We focussed mainly on footsteps for the first recordings as it is an important sound which we will use in our

soundscape to determine perspective. We went to the cathedral and recorded footsteps through the archway. This was done with a zoom h4n recorder and then with a shotgun microphone. The archway was great for recording footsteps as the reverb in there caused the footsteps to seem a lot  darker which is what we were aiming for with our soundscape brief.

We also recorded a fence rattling. Our soundscape will tell the story of a man walking home late at night alone, being kidnapped and then taken to a basement and blindfolded in a chair. The first part of the soundscape needs to build an eerie expectation of what is about to unfold and so sounds such as the wind blowing in the trees and fences and gates rattling areprefect for creating that atmosphere.

We also wanted to include sounds which were unnatural in that situation, add effects to them and embed them into the situation. For example, we recorded a phone vibrating on a table and reduced the pitch so that it created a deep rumbling sound unrecognisable from the phone vibration.

Researching into Binaural recordings and how they can create a clear sense of perspective influenced us to experiment with that sort of audio. We attempted to create a binaural recording by placing 2 boundary microphones on a cardboard box roughly the same width as the ears are from one another. The results were highly unimpressive and created a highly unpleasant and excessive level of background noise which clouded any foreground sounds which we wanted to focus on. This may have been due to the use of two different boundary microphones which were of different sensitivities, capturing sounds very different from that in which the ears would pick up.

Below are two pieces of audio (the vibrating phone) The latter has a Pitch II pitch shifter alongside a small amount of EQ to highlight certain key frequencies and a Reverb.