Audio Hardware Review

I really enjoyed building my microphones by hand. I’ve always enjoyed building things whether it is cabinets or a set for a play (I was in stage crew in high school). I also like that I wasn’t using some high tech piece of equipment and just making due with what I have. That being said, soldering is way harder than I thought it would be. When I watched a demo on building the microphones and it said to solder the wires I just though “No problem, seems easy enough.” After the first twenty minutes or so I quickly learned that soldering is easier said than done. My microphones themselves worked pretty well on my Drift walk I thought. I had some wind noise here and there, but it was a windy day so I’ll cut them some slack. I was able to capture the overall ambience fairly well and I’m happy with the way my recordings of them turned out. I didn’t try to record many extreme close-ups on my Drift, but the ones I did try out were sometime distorted or weren’t particularly clean recordings due to all the background noises the microphones also picked up. I personally don’t know that much about what kind of recording equipment is out there, but my ideal microphone and recorder set up would have ultra wind screens so that there wouldn’t be any interference on the recording. The recording device would have an easy to use interface and mic volume could be easily controlled.

The MiniDisc recorder is infuriating; I would completely hate it if it didn’t make decent recordings. The interface can be very confusing at times. The biggest complaint I have, and I’m sure it’s pretty high on everyone else’s list too, is having to change the record volume to manual every single time you want to take a new recording. This is actually the first device I’ve ever used to solely record sound. I’ve used a common camcorder and extracted audio off of that, and the microphone on my Mac. Using the camcorder is actually easier to use, however it feels like a waste of tape when you’re just using it to record audio. As for the Mac, it’s not the greatest microphone it has built in. It’s very easy to distort the sound and generally it records a rather low quality of audio. I just want a recorder that is easy to use and gets high quality recordings, is that too much to ask?

I edited my audio on the freeware application Audacity. I’d never used the program before this drift, but I found it pretty easy to use even for someone with as limited audio knowledge as myself. I chose to use Audacity mostly on recommendation from others as well as knowing its reputation as a pretty good audio editing program (as far as getting things for free go). I will probably continue to use it on following drifts. I found the interface simple to understand, although I didn’t play around with all of the effects too much because I wasn’t sure what they would do. Then again, if I don’t know what they do I should experiment to find out so I can later use it to my advantage.

Ten Questions

1. What kind of narrative can I tell with my video?
2. What kind of urban artwork (such as graffiti or murals) are present?
3. Are there any interesting houses around?
4. How far can I descend and still see upwards?
5. Is there any interesting discarded trash?
6. Are there any abandoned areas devoid of activity?
7. What parks or playgrounds can be found?
8. How different is the area during rush hour?
9. What sculptures are in the area?
10. What advertisements have been placed around?

My First Drift: A Retrospective

After going out on my first drift, I had a felt decent experience and it was an overall interesting sound walk. That being said, I certainly had my fair share of difficulties. First and foremost, my drift strategy was simply to go east as far as I could. This is a problem since I was unfamiliar with the area and started my drift on Downer Ave and you can only go east for four blocks before you hit Lake Dr and can’t go any further. I was also irritated that my two attempts at trying to record in a unique way didn’t really work out so well. The first try was by putting one microphone in each side of a stop sign in hopes each mic would pick up a very different sound. What ended up happening was one mic picked up a bunch of activity and the other didn’t pick up anything other than white noise. The other attempt was by putting the microphones in a hole in a stone sculpture. The recording didn’t come out as anything interesting and was kind of disheartening.

I found myself at some point taking a recording on a path by Lake Michigan by a bunch of shrubbery to capture audio of some of the bugs in the area. While I was making the recording I felt strangely at piece just listening to the surrounding ambient noise. The mix of wind, waves, birds, and bugs was very pleasant. I just closed my eyes and breathed for a few moments of piece. I’d like to say that I had more than just that one moment of serenity, but I can’t honestly say that I did. I was very focused on what I was doing and was overall just irritated by my lack of planning in my drift strategy. I was always walking somewhere or thinking about how the recording was going or what I was going to do next. My mind was too busy to relax.

I had a few unexpected things happen to me over the course of my project, too. Only one unexpected thing happened during the drift itself. While I was recording a mix of a sprinkler to my left and a man hedging bushes straight ahead of me, a fairly large dragonfly zipped right past my microphones and I captured the audio of it. I was pretty excited about that. Once I’d gotten back inside and in front on a computer I was surprised to find that none of my recordings were particularly terrible. All of them were pretty balanced and didn’t get so loud that they were distorted. My biggest surprise though was once I had finished my editing I discovered through peer reviews that two of my recordings that I hadn’t really thought too much of turned out to be my best ones for various reasons (good sense of space, relaxing, etc.)

I can’t pinpoint one particular part of my drift experience that really affected me. What really gets to me is that through the experience of doing a drift I can see the places where I made mistakes and how to fix them next time around. My drift strategy for example, I will make a point to put myself in a more interesting situation as well as a more random method of choosing a destination (I’m currently thinking of rolling dice). I have a much better idea of how to use my microphones effectively, as well as what to listen for in the editing room. This is frequently how I react to anything I do artistically, I’m never satisfied with the work I put out when I care about what it is I’m doing