This week of class, we were given two new short clips for which to design sound. A drone view of London and a short animation of an astronaut in space. with this, I was handed a H5 stereo field recorder and told to spend the next hour exploring Elephant and Castle gathering sounds.
Field recording is the action of capturing sounds and audio recordings in an open environment without the aid of studios. Recording in the “field” means to work outside with no walls or booths or control room filled with audio engineers and high tec computers. With field recording it is all about capturing audio straight from the source.
What’s great about the H5 recorder is the X/Y stereo mic pattern. The X/Y pattern is the most commonly used stereo technique. It is used to mimic the way our ears work (binaural), relying on the time delay of a sound that arrives at one microphone compared to another which means it is able to provide a deep sense of ambience.
Before I went out to record sounds I watched the clip through a couple of times while down important ‘hit points’ (you might call it) to collect sounds for. By doing this, I could record everything I needed without having to go back out and record more, saving myself lots of time and energy. For example, there was lots of visible traffic going from left to right in the clip, so I parked myself in front of a busy street and
Since it was my first time using a field mic there was a slight learning curve. I learnt this the hard way with a bunch of my first recordings being completely unusable since I hadn’t gain staged the microphone correctly. Another thing I figured out was the mic was very directional and that I had to point at exactly what I wanted to hear or else it wouldn’t be picked up. I had to be careful not to use too much gain as the field recorder could capture sounds from extremely far that could bleed into the audio. Luckily for me the clip I was given benefitted from this with the ambience I recorded capturing all the minor details of what you hear walking through the streets of London.
For the astronaut clip, there were some sounds I wanted to add that would have been almost impossible to recreate myself so I utilised an application I found called Soundly, which gave me the ability to download ready-made sound effects in an instant. This will be useful for me down the line when I’m struggling to get the right tone for a piece of foley.
I came back and loaded everything I recorded into Ableton and spent the next hour or so lining up all of the usable audio clips and panning them to create my sound design piece. When it came to exporting the files I ran into a challenging issue involving the coding of the video clip, so after troubleshooting with no success, I had to use another application to export it. Diego recommended I try Davinci Resolve, so I installed it and roughly figured out how to use it so that I could successfully export my project.
Field (2020). Acoustic Nature. [online] Acoustic Nature. Available at: https://acousticnature.com/journal/what-is-field-recording?srsltid=AfmBOoq395ccrC8F388oEC9qxpQKd1mXQxwSvVl7fpSBgrzOjryq3aV0 [Accessed 2 Dec. 2024].
Www.sfu.ca. (2020). Field Recording. [online] Available at: https://www.sfu.ca/sonic-studio-webdav/cmns/Handbook%20Tutorial/FieldRecording.html.