Sounds of the City

21 Aug 2019

Navigating London:

Sound workshop 27 Aug 2019

In today’s sound workshop with Matt, we learnt some ways of expressing, enhancing and enriching narratives through the use and analysis of sound markers, overlaying, repetition and reverberation of sound tracks. In a team of 4, we recorded the sounds of White City and the Shepherd’s Bush market, using a shotgun microphone and … recorder. In the sound workshop, we listened to some examples of sound art utilising sound editing software, overlaying and repetition. A moving piece among them was, “Jesus blood never failed me yet”, an overlay of the song by the same name, with an orchestra enhancing the notes and lyrics.

Next, we went to the Mac room to edit our recordings into a narrative, using the Reaper software.

Some notes on Reaper:

Having done this exercise, I realised that Reaper was a much advanced version of imovie (that I had been using previously for overlaying audio and video) and found it interesting to be able to manipulate a number of different factors affecting the sound. As Matt commented, and I observed, the audio recording equipment used today was a very efficient tool for recording sound, especially compared to the iphone voice recorder, on account of the wind jamming, low cut, input controls and focussing features of of the microphone and recorder combination.