For a mini project this week I was tasked with gathering a few sound recordings, from my local area, by use of a microphone and compile a short composition. The reason for this project was to appreciate the sonic of the environment rather than the visual. Inspiration for this work was as a result of looking at a famous practitioner called Peirre Schaeffer who many believe lead to the electronic acoustic music genre due to his experimental approach with manipulating recordings in the 1940s. An example of his work is below.
The parameters of the task were to either keep recordings in their original form or manipulate them to create some random sounds and produce an experimental clip. I decided to go along the manipulation route. The listed programs below were used in this exercise:-
- Adobe Premiere Pro
- Adobe After Effects
- Adobe Photoshop
- Adobe Sound Booth
I gathered samples from inside and outside buildings as well as quite and noisy environments trying to gain a diverse range in sounds. The files were downloaded to a computer. I quickly found that by using the field recording microphone getting a clear sample was some what troublesome, many were too distorted for use. Out of fourteen recordings collected only four usable samples could provide the basis for my project. The following clips below were used.
I started off by using Adobe Sound Booth to analyze the recordings so I could start manipulating them in various ways. Some of the methods used were; stretching the pitch and timing, looping, adding effects in the equalizer and overlaying sounds. The snapshots below give an overview.
The next step in the project was to create a wallpaper in Adobe Photoshop and create a audio reactive equalizer in Adobe After Effects. By combining them both I had created my visuals ready to upload to YouTube for the purpose of this blog. The final stage in this process was to use Adobe Premier Pro to combine the visuals with my sound samples in order to export the clip. Below is the finished result.
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