On Tuesday morning we had class, and introduced ourselves to our guest tutor who will be taking us for this project. We were shown a pile of interesting links including https://aporee.org/maps/ where I'm required to upload some of my own sounds. We had a guest who had a small record label and produced compositions of noise. We listened to one for a few minutes and it really was noise. That said there was a definite progression. Which lead me to a thought as I noticed slight impatience. Some of the more artistic and conceptual pieces require a listener to pay attention for an extended amount of time because the progress is slow. But it can be rewarding. Some pieces are drawn out and that is the point. You cannot get the experience from it if it was short. There is no radio edit mix, not cliff notes version. The experience is fundamentally tied to the length.

Anyway, we were then introduced to a new piece of equipment, the Zoom recorder. We got into groups of 3 or 4 and embarked on recording the city. Out group walked to a construction site at the bottom of town that I'd noticed a couple of days earlier was mildly interesting to listen to. Well I thought so anyway. We also walked around the waterfront and recorded the sea, fountains, birds, cars and possibly all the usual stuff one records when given a recorder for the first time. At the end of the week we were to have made a composition no longer than 3 minutes of sounds. We were also to make individual compositions. We were to get away from the idea of being musical and concentrate on just the sounds. We were not allowed to treat the sounds, other than cutting up or layering if we so wished - but we didn't have to chop anything up.

On Wednesday we had another guest. He was also interested in noise, and had engineer friends build him a couple of different analogue noise boxes. We were treated to a slideshow of various equipment he used and how it was set up. I found it all rather interesting. The noise boxes would be fed into a mixing desk which would then loop back into itself a couple of times and then to other equipment, possibly including an old Panasonic vision mixing desk. He'd then feed all of that into a second mixer for final mix down and he'd record as a live performance. It all appealed on some level, possibly because I've mucked around with old equipment in similar ways in the now distant past. It makes me lament how I've left ideas behind or discarded stuff as junk or previously written off possible experiments because they weren't some sort of established musical theory.

Anyway, the our guest also mixed audio and video into the vision mixer and projected it in artspaces and has managed to sell pieces.

We also listened to various links, including a genre called glitch music. I was quite surprised how familiar it sounded, something you'd likely hear on bfm and very appealing to me. Glitch music concentrates on the mistakes of electronica and makes a track from it. The example we heard was apparently from a guy who buys CDs, scribbles on them with a market then plays the result.

I've never really tried to compose such music but it sounded similar to something I'd like to make. I'd have wasted hours try to do something that is actually much more random and the result of errors. There is a lesson in there, that music and sound is much more organically produced than attempting to score everything either on paper or as midi data or as "non-destructive" audio data. It's not all like photoshop with adjustment layers. Sometimes you have to feed back and destroy the original and sometimes you don't know what you will end up with until you do it. I enjoy lessons like that because until this course I've constrained myself way too much. In some ways an experimental approach is easier, although I guess one can produce more waste.

Our group did some more recording in the afternoon.

Thursday our we looked at more interesting links, such as John Cage and his 4:30 silent piece. We sat through the whole thing and this once again brought home the "no radio edit mix" idea. He also had a really nice piece (I thought) that consisted of him playing a piano that had nails, screws and unidentified plastic objects jammed in the piano strings.

The days had sort of built up on each other slowly and it would be nice to think that this exploration might lead anyone who currently listens to say, ZM (or just about any commercial station really, but they are a good one to pick on) for their daily dose of compressed sugarwater crud might suddenly start hearing it for the abomination that it is...

We also touched on Delia Derbyshire, an early electronic music composer best known for realising the Doctor Who theme - a bit of music I have a slight fascination with.

Our group started to piece together some of the sounds. I hadn't had the chance to record my own sounds yet as there was one recorder and everyone had a turn so I was mildly anxious to do that instead. It was a bit difficult to work as a group on the sound editing for a few reasons, one is that there were no real quiet spaces for us to work together. I went for lunch and took the recorder and recorded a local food court and came back 2 members had begun to make good progress. I hung around for a while but it was a bit pointless, with studio noise, and a small mac screen and I was much more interested in my own composition anyway. I put on my headphones and listened to their progress, liked what I'd heard, made a couple of suggestions and went home to record more of my sounds.

There is a park across the road from where I currently live, so I tried to get as far away from the busy road as possible about there would always be distant road noise.

I recorded a stream but doubted I'd use it as water recordings seem like an obvious choice and a bit clichéd. I cranked up the recorder to it's highest settings (96khz/24bit) and recorded birds, ambiance, me walking on gravel, cars, a truck parked up near by (the driver took issue at first, I don't know what he thought I was doing).

What was interesting was all the sounds that I thought might be interesting were pretty lame. It was unplanned recordings that where generally much more interesting.

I mucked around in garage band but couldn't find the automation controls and it was getting late. I wound up editing it all in Adobe Premiere which may seem odd but it worked quite well. Given more time I'd try to edit it in a dedicated audio application.

The composition kept me up quite late (or early should I say). I'm not entirely happy with it, I think it's a bit obvious and perhaps falls into the trap of being too rhythmic. When I recorded myself walking on gravel I already had an idea that it had a march to it and I'd make use of that. I think that was a mistake, too staged and too musical which is a little hard to avoid when it's second nature to put musical structure to something. That said it's not too musical. Just slightly. I feel like I cheated somewhat, we weren't to add effects but I wound up layering the same wave file over and over and offsetting them slightly to see what would happen. I was thinking of the percussion in Strawberry Fields by the Beatles when I did that actually.

I felt limited though by time. I needed sleep and I'd only been given a few hours and no transport to record sounds and quite frankly I didn't like much of what I'd captured. One of my favourite sounds was a bathroom fan actually. I chucked that in, it's the low hum in the entire track. I didn't have a concept other than to sound um... cool. But I'd like to do a new one.

After I pieced it together I decided to carve out space in the spectrum for each sound using EQ. Basically just rolling off frequencies where each sound didn't have as much presence. I don't recall ever actually getting to do this before though I've been aware of the technique for years. It prevents a muddy mess of different sounds competing with each other. I have no idea if I did it right or rolled off frequencies enough. I started by applying a bypass filter to each sound to determine where it sounded most present in the spectrum. From there I took off the bypass and applied parametric EQ instead. When I feel a bit more relaxed time-wise I want to listen to the before and after with greater attention and also experiment. I think there is room to become more attuned to the differences between a carved and a muddy track.

The title doesn't really mean anything, Walk in the Park, and all the echos just add to a slightly anxious feeling I guess.

One last thing that bothered me about my recordings was wind. Wind ruins recordings. It also often causes clipping right when you thought the levels were low enough. That really ruins recordings.

On Friday our groups presented our group efforts.

I was a bit apprehensive about going up when I didn't really edit the final piece. Though only because I didn't want to take credit. It was pretty good I thought. I don't currently have a copy.

I still have the recorder so I might make use of it. It comes with a 1gb SD card and at highest quality that would capture about 30 mins of audio. I however have a 32gb SD card in my camera and 4 sets f rechargeable batteries. So I might go and explore this weekend. Although I have Maths and Art work do get done.