When finishing the first draft of my audio paper, I’ve tried to link my thoughts and research into academia within art studies to my own experiences with ADHD and reading/writing. I’ve also made an attempt at coming up with a proposal for what I think could be a way forward for art studies within higher education, although I’m not sure how realistic it is. The basic conclusion I’ve come to so far is that whilst a contextual understanding of the debates and conversations surrounding contemporary sound art is definitely useful to a degree, it would perhaps be beneficial for students to be able to choose the ratio of practical to written work in their course – to an extent.

Obviously, I’m not saying to scrap written work and reading entirely for students that this doesn’t appeal to – it’s very important to be able to describe one’s process to justify and explain work that has been produced, and reading also plays a large part in the development of contextual awareness that is important to developing one’s own practice. I also don’t want it to seem as though I am whining or complaining about having to do written work – my thoughts and opinions on this subject have definitely evolved as I have worked my way through the script. I’ve found that producing an audio paper has been a useful way of combining practical and written elements to create a body of work that questions the state of contemporary arts education. However, I also see, and have felt personally, that the world of academic writing and reading can often be intimidating to students who join art courses primarily to create practical work and learn practical skills. Maybe lectures could be given to make this world of academic writing seem less impenetrable? I understand the argument that academic writing surrounding sound art is often only made by academics for other academics to read, which would be the same as, for example, papers written by scientists studying for their PHDs which are only ever meant to be read by other scientists. However, a demystification process of sorts, a few lessons to help students who struggle with the language used in these papers, could be useful. It’s difficult to imagine a reality in which this exists, though, as funding is constantly being squeezed out of arts courses by the government. It is a difficult topic to find a conclusion for.

Before I began to record this paper, I had the idea of the pencil scribbles running underneath my voice. Having recorded both of these elements now, I think they work well together – the writing noise adds to a soundscape which I am hoping to fully develop of the surroundings in which I have written the script. I want to create a soundscape that can at times slightly distract the listener from what I am saying, maybe make their brain wander. My brain was constantly wandering off whilst writing the script, not on purpose, but just because I can’t concentrate for longer periods of time very well and it takes me quite a while to write usually. I want to create a mood of constantly being slightly distracted by one’s surroundings, especially in a busy cityscape.

Unfortunately when I first attempted to record my dialogue for the paper, my interface stopped working (it’s an old one and I think the phantom power stopped working). This was a bit frustrating as I was recording pretty close to the deadline (completely my fault and I should’ve done this earlier!) and I had to give back the microphone I was using to record my voice to LCC the next day, and it was not available for me to book out afterwards as we are approaching the winter break. I would make use of the studios at uni, however they’re not available at any of the times I’m free in the coming week. I did manage to borrow a microphone and interface from a friend for a few days, so that’s how I’ve started recording dialogue. This is annoying as because of my poor time management the project will unfortunately have to be handed in a bit late as I don’t have extra support in place at the moment (I’m on the waiting list for a screening), however hopefully it will give me more time to make the paper better quality.

To make the sounds of my voice and the writing congeal together, I’ve sent both tracks to a bus with a very small room reverb. It’s not meant to be heard necessarily, but just to create a sense that both are happening in the same space, simultaneously. Here’s the settings I’ve used:

I’ve also added 11.9db of gain onto the writing track using Logic’s gain plugin, as the recording I have is too quiet. I could’ve re-recorded it, but adding the gain sounds perfectly adequate and if I don’t need to record my scribbling for 10 minutes again, then why should I?!

The final vocal track is also a comp of a few different takes – when recording I’d usually get to around a minute or two of perfect speech until I’d fluff up a line, so in instances like this I have just started recording from the nearest possible break in my speech that I can.

To start building the soundscape I’ve found a couple of good recordings from the BBC Sound Effects website of a narrowboat engine and some lakeside nature sounds:

This is a good start, although when I come to finishing this piece off I would like to add more cityscape sounds to truly recreate what I experience. Just for context, here is the view from where I’ve been writing:

What’s left to do now is to further build the soundscape and insert the recordings of the interviews I carried out with my coursemates. Unfortunately, Dr Vasseur hasn’t replied to me just yet, which is a shame as I think his words would count as a very valuable piece of primary research, however I still have some time so fingers crossed that he gets back to me!