In order to continue building the soundscape of my surroundings, I tried to make a mental list of all the sounds that I would usually hear on a day-to-day basis. These include:

Fire from a woodburner:

Traffic on the main road:

Ambulance going past:

The large fountain that seems to run all day in the nearby luxury apartments:

The DLR running past:

And the planes from London City Airport that I previously posted a clip of on the BBC Sound Effects Review. Likewise, all of these clips are from the BBC Sound Effects website, which I have found very useful in helping me build the soundscape of all the noise I will usually hear in the space of 10 minutes of my day.

When putting the clips together I mostly left them as they were as I didn’t feel as though they needed effects or much EQ on them, they seemed to slot pretty easily together. However, I did add a convolution reverb to the fountain to make it sound further away, as it does in reality:

I ran into some challenges when trying to insert the the voice clips from the interviews I had conducted. One of the clips worked completely fine – it was sent over Whatsapp and I just downloaded it onto my computer. and dropped into the recording However, the interview that I felt was most beneficial to the point my paper is trying to make was sent over Instagram and I had some real challenges with it. The interviewee (a student from my course) was talking about how the writing in courses benefits some students whereas others find it difficult, and that students that find it difficult shouldn’t take it as a reflection on themselves if they don’t feel like they succeed in it. They also said that they felt it would be better if students could have more of a choice between written work and practical work, and I thought this was a really insightful comment that would benefit the paper. Unfortunately because this was over Instagram I couldn’t download the voice note, so I had to take a screen recording to get the audio. However, when I tried to take this recording the voice note wouldn’t play back, and even when I wasn’t recording it wouldn’t play back either. It was as if it had deleted itself, which I’ve never know to happen before on the app. I asked the interviewee and they said they had the same problem as well, so a few days later they sent me another voice note with a similar response to my question. Unfortunately I encountered the same problem again. I would’ve asked the interviewee to send the second voice note over Whatsapp so there would be no problems, however they actually sent the second one before I’d asked them to – which was very nice of them! However when it turned out I couldn’t play it back to record it a day later, I didn’t want to ask them to record another response again as I felt like it would be asking too much of interviewees to get them to send the same answer to a question three times over because of my technical problems. I’ve realised that in the future it would be better to conduct these interviews in person. This situation is a shame, as I do think the content paper is going to suffer from the lack of this clip. This also meant I had to re-record a few lines and change the script due to my response to the interviews having to change.

However, a positive note is that Dr Vasseur finally got back to me! Had the paper been handed in on time, I wouldn’t have been able to include his response as he only got back to me a day after the deadline. Although I’d rather have handed the paper in on time, I’m still happy to have this response as I feel as though what he has said is very balanced and contributes as good primary research towards my paper.

I haven’t added too much processing to the vocal track I previously recorded, only a noise gate to drown out the building works that were happening nearby when recording the track:

There’s also a few seconds in the paper where I ‘play’ the part of an English teacher I used to have being a bit snobbish about ex-polytechnics. I thought it’d make the paper a bit more interesting if I gave this character a different tone of voice, so I put my speech through Logic’s Vocal Transformer plugin, changing the pitch by +1 and formant by -3:

This is the result:

It’s a bit strange but I think it’s quite a playful aspect to add to the paper.

I’ve put most of the BBC Sound Effects tracks as a constantly running background throughout the piece, with the exception of the ambulance, plane and DLR effects. I’ve faded them all out at the end, in time with the end of my writing clip where I drop the pencil on the page I’ve been writing on.

I don’t really feel as though there’s much mixing to be done on this. I adjusted a lot of the levels and a couple of EQs as I was recording the paper, and even then I felt as though some of the work I did with the EQ sounded worse than when I left it alone. I’ve panned a few of the soundscape tracks a little bit to create a sense of space, although I’ve tried to keep it as natural as possible. I’d say the paper is pretty much finished now, and in my next blog I will be reviewing the final outcome.