I enjoy the act of collaborating and would like to do more in the future, although this asssignment has definitely reinforced my ideas about how I best enjoy collaborating. Communication, bouncing ideas off of people, really reinforcing the source media and trying to enhance it in every way. These are what I feel that collaboration is all about, and I will be doing my best in future to ensure that those are the working conditions by which I operate.

Next year on Sound Arts I hope to be doing lots of electronics experiments. This discipline involves plenty of collaborating and learning as I’ll be needing enclosures for my circuits, I don’t feel that it is impossible that I’ll need some digital circuitry controlling some circuits in future – I know nothing about digital electronics, so that will involve me getting help from someone else. I’m also a novice at analogue electronics, which makes conversation and collaborating an essential tool on the road to becoming proficient.

Overall I’ve felt disengaged with this unit. The other unit, CIISA, captivated my attention more simply because of the required workload, and also the ability to write about whatever I please. This collaborating unit felt slightly shackled, but I don’t think that this was helped by my shoddy attendance. I’ve been ‘collbaorating’ (also known as engaging in countless hours of harrowing unpaid work) lots outside of university, working with other students and people in a similar age bracket to create projects; I don’t often feel shackeled in that context. More often that not I’m outside of my comfort zone and I feel encouraged to be creatively solving problems that occur.

In terms of how my group did; I feel like we were very average compared to other groups. We worked hard, but due to all of us having other projects on the go we didnt work as hard as some of the other groups. FMOD integration, for example, is something that we dropped the ball on, although not many other groups actually managed to use FMOD; Dereck and Jinya’s group stood out as one that implimented the audio into the game code to great success.

We met up at Dan’s house to do the mixing and spatialisation – it went very well, minimal work was needed to tie things together. Levelling, a bit of reverb of some channels but no more than that. This was actually very surprising and forunate – we had allocated a lot of time for mixing as we thought we would have a bit of a jigsaw puzzle on our hands but it turned out great!

Afterwards, we incorporated some spatial aspects within the wind and atmos, creating a more immersive surround sound soundscape using binaurally panning software. This immersion wasn’t so noticeable unless listened to back-to-back with the prior mix, but I have found that lots of small changes like that add up to create a subtly nuanced mix.

Dialogue recording was done at my house, I set up this old Philips mic which has a very un-sensitive diaphragm and also a narrow, filtered frequency response. This all results in a very dry, radio/telephone style sound which required only a touch of compression to make it sound right. No additional filtering or tone alteration occured, just the straight mic signal. A touch of compression and that was the sound that ended up in the game.

The voice actress was a good friend of mine named Emily, and though she doesn’t really sound old enough to be a mother I don’t think think that it’s unreasonable to suspend reality for that one detail. Being a student, many of the people I encounter that could be voice actors for me are also of student age. This is a limitation that didn’t occur to me at first, but in future I’ll know to try and get a more age-appropriate actor for the dialogue. Voice tone character is more important that I realised initially.

How accurately does this assignment simulate the range of collaborating experiences that sound practitioners participate in within a professional context?

This unit has felt very disconnected; the (cross discipliniary) collaboration and communication was minimal and if this was occuring within the confines of a professional job I would feel unsure as to the exact conditions for a successful set of deliverables. Someone playing the role of a producer or creative organiser would have been very helpful when it came to marrying the two fields of study, although spending the project partly in the dark seems to be a realistic preparation for the world of ‘real work’. Low budget projects often seem to be disorganised.

Internally, amongst my sound arts group, the communication and ease of collaboration was through the roof – all went well there, but I think that often happens on teams of sound practitioners. We mostly get along well, at least this has been my experience encountering sound workers in the world of professional work.

Integrating our audio into the game world using FMOD was always an intimidating notion to us, but we felt confident that we could surmount the challenge when it came up (especially with Iñaki on board; a computer -grounded man). So, when the potential to instead dub the audio to a video demo as one would treat a movie, we unanimously agreed that it would be prudent to take the path of least resistance so as to ensure a more equal role-distribution system and a more guaranteed easily achievable assignment. Especially at a time when all of us have so much other work to be getting on with – working on audio for others’ final projects and other external things.

Besides, we never managed to get an FMOD file from or equivalent MA course-mates.

Whilst conversing about the best methods with which to accompany the plot of the game through audio, Iñaki Dan and I landed on the idea to manipulate the player’s sense of space. Due to the minimal in-game movement and subtle foley cues we had to work with, finding an avenue to focus on seemed the best option. Creating a contrast of space between inside and outside the phonebooth; creating an environment of quieter contemplation within the booth and emphasising the harsh storm on the outside.

Although we talked together as a group a lot about atmos and the sense of space, it was Dan who ended up with the task of actually sculpting the atmos. He did a great job, spatialising the wind with binaural pan pots. He also went and did some evening field recordings inside a phone booth to get the room tone (is a phonebooth a room?) which turned out great and provided a very immersive sound stage.

Overall the immersive and all-encompassing nature of the game turned out to be very successful in my opinion, and it was a good example of having the germ of an idea and then fleshing it out through discussions before actually acting on those decisions in the DAW.

We have decided to delagate according to the following specifications:

Iñaki: ‘Music’, comprising mostly abstract audioscapes.

Dan: Foley.

Hywel: Dialogue recording, atmos and tension building drones.

We’ve elected to each go away and create our own sounds, and then reconvene at a later date to combine and spatialise our recordings.

I’ll be using an old microphone pulled out of a desktop cassette dictation device build by Sony. This will give a filtered, phone-like quality to the dialogue recordings and will ensure that less work will have to be done in post to artificially create a filtered sound.

Tension building drones will be synthesisers and manipulated field recordings.

Atmos will most likely be pulled from my existing audio archive of recordings.