Microphones

This self portrait/documentation of my own daily rhythms has involved a lot of very quiet sound sources: unscrewing a Moka pot, the ticking of a mechanical stopwatch, playing a quiet guitar very softly, gentle breathing, clothes brushing together. I started off using an AKG p40 – a large diaphragm condenser mic, and I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the clarity in the top end or the ability to pickup supremely quiet nuances in the sound (I’m not too sure if there’s a name for this characteristic of mics? For example, dynamic mics have a low ability to do this, but the larger diaphragm condensers often are very good at it, and the more modern AKG C414’s that I have access to on campus can sometimes even pick up super low freq rumble from road noise outside the building, completely inaudible to my own ears). I was looking for something more akin to the ASMR tropes of very present top end and a strong, weighty proximity effect. I borrowed a friend’s Sontronics Orpheus microphone for the mid channel of my M/S recording, and that was exactly what I was after – it was delicate and precise, significantly more clear with more ‘resolution’ (I know that it isn’t actually providing more resolution in the technical sense of the word) in the top end, with a less mid-focused sound than the P420. It improved my recordings greatly.

Preamps

I have two types of preamps available to me – those that are built into my desk (a 90s-ish Soundcraft live console) and those built into my interface (a Behringer 10/in 10/out interface). I had noticed that the Behringer pre’s were less noisy and more clear than the Soundcraft ones, but due to the routing of my studio I am running mics through the console into the interface into Protools. Unsure of whether the console would add undesirable noise in certain circumstances, I did some experiments with different amounts of amplification from both preamps and bypassing one or the other to see if there was a balance between the two that suits these types of quiet sources the best, and found that running the console at unity and then doing all of my amplification within the interface worked the best. I found it quite interesting that the console performed well with mic level signals running through its buses, not adding very much noise at all – I would have expected the console to run optimally with amplified signals, but it seems that the worst of the noise comes from pushing the preamps to their limits, and is not inherent to the circuitry.

Upon hearing about my interest in finding rhythms in daily life, Milo referred me towards Henri Lefebvre’s book Rhythmanalysis. I initially thought that it would be primarily about audio rhythms but instead I am finding that its a book grounded in the larger rhythms of life, looking into the nature of repetition and how we live our lives by weaving in amongst rhythms both inherent to existence and constructed by ourselves. This has lent a new perspective to my piece of work, and has inspired me to re-structure the sequencing of audio – perhaps to represent a day in my life, chronologically ordering the recordings to reflect the repetitious aspects of things. The piece seems to be re-shaping from a self portrait derived simply from pleasurable sounds into a work about daily rhythms (both audio and life-based), and I now plan to include a series of harsher, less pleasant sounds as a representation of the unwelcome life-rhythms that I experience.

This talk of life-rhythms has resonated with me greatly, and it feels as though I’m a step or two closer to figuring out what my own happiness is centered around. Taking time to observe the rhythms in play feels like a tremendous reason to be alive. The slow changing of seasons, the way we start our days in our own unique manners, the more complex evolving rhythms of growing older and behaving differently, and the polyrhythms of interaction that occur when coexisting with others. Certainly, it seems to be an easier raison d’etre to explain than the overall peculiarity of existence that I feel is fundamental to my understanding of life (referenced in the blog post titled THE ABSTRACT [or rather, an abstract for the abstract]).

I stumbled across a potential title for this audio paper that is giving me so much trouble:

The Unspoken Agreement, or rather; this is how we’re doing life now.

This is in reference to a subject that I feel is integral to my life but is such a frustratingly difficult thing to explain that it makes me wonder if it’s just blindingly simple and the fact that I can’t explain it very well means that there really isn’t much to it. Focusing too hard on it sort of makes it slip away, like trying to pop a tapioca pearl on a flat surface using only your index finger, whilst both the finger and the pearl are covered in a generous quantity of extra virgin olive oil.

The root of the matter is how peculiar everything is. But examples of this seem to fall short of the mark; I feel that these things are wondrously gleeful and ironic, but I sometimes think that this attributes say more about my own outlook on life rather than intrinsic features of the examples. An example I’ve been providing recently in conversation with people is call centers for tech support; people are employed to work in these places, often at low wages and with bad hours, working in cramped, busy, noisy environments. It is safe to assume that the workers do not want to be there. The customer calling the support line equally despises having to make the call, and would (in most cases) much rather have a comprehensive and well written guide on how to solve their (often tech related) issues. In fact, the call centre worker is often just reading from a handbook and relaying the information back to the customer in real time. Instead of having a simple solution to these issues, we now have a situation where two humans are begrudgingly talking to each other, which I see as a symptom of the unfathomably complex bureaucratic spaghetti that we are drowning in on a daily basis.

***THIS SECTION ADDED LATER***

This blog post has been sitting in the ‘drafts’ part of the site for a couple of weeks now, and I considered deleting it as it seems as though it doesn’t relate to my current feelings about my audio paper – I am still yet to stumble across a simple solution or even a thread of ideas to pull at with regards to the above concept. It also feels supremely dismissive of human thoughts and opinions, casting human emotions as just another pawn on a field of mildly amusing misfortunes about modern living – this, I definitely don’t like. And thus the concept is relegated to a strange limbo, still dwelling in my mind but having no logical conclusion, no satisfying journey of exploration. However, I decided to post it (despite it being an unfinished set of ideas and written in a slightly clunky and quite unsympathetic manner) because it serves as an illustration of my thought processes, and records one of the ideas I considered before landing on the final one.

Process, after all, is everything.

Skimming over my blog post titled ‘An audio self portrait’ I realised that I hadn’t written much about my motivations for creating a self portrait, so this post will elaborate on that.

This piece of work is intended to bridge a slowly widening gap between me and my work; I’ve been struggling to feel a personal connection to my ‘sound arts’ work, and yet I think that there are a few things that I would like to express within that context (as opposed to a music context, which is a side of my art that I’m now digging my teeth into again). For example, one of these things is the overall peculiarity of life and the sense of quiet amusement that I find almost everywhere in the absurdity of all of the little systems, situations and processes that make up modern living. Another, touched upon during first year, is an interest in liminalism, liminal spaces and what we do with spaces once we no longer have a use for them, leading into some psychogeography research. Figuring out how to express some of these ideas within a sonic context (especially because some of them are not initially grounded in audio, but rather in vague undefined feelings) has proved tough, so the decision to strip things back and create something more personal is one that I hope will fit into my own catalogue of work as a turning point, enabling me to better identify methods of expressing ideas that initially seem scatterbrained.

I see it as a first thread to pull, that will hopefully lead on to more experiments. Following some comments on process made by Milo during Studio Praxis lessons I’ve decided to experimentally readjust my process to be less precious about everything being a means to and end, and rather focusing on being proactive in a manner that will lead on to the next step, following through with these explorations and welcoming that I’ll likely end up somewhere that is distant from my initial ideas. There are many potential routes splaying outwards: there is a certain element of ASMR to some of these sounds that I’ve been recording, there are notes of sound therapy, how sound dictates my purchases and clothing, shoe choice, finding rhythm in everyday life, recording my personality through time, how the space in which I live influences the sound of my life (psychogeography again), and there are probably more elements that I’ve not even noticed yet.

Still definitely struggling to find an essay subject, I had an interesting conversation with a course-mate (Iñaki) about my internal strife. We talked about absurd things, trying to illustrate the absurdity of modern day living and about perhaps researching a phenomenon rather than a cultural scene. Footsteps came up in conversation, owing to my choice of shoes, and I reported that I enjoyed their sound. I was wearing a pair of oxfords, and they make a nice clack when walking on hard surfaces due to their thin, rigid sole. Iñaki mentioned that the sound of heels reminds him of getting ready to leave the house, as his mother would wear heels when going out for dinner etc. The idea suddenly arrived in my head to interview people on the move about their footwear choice, with an additional microphone dangling down to capture both of our footsteps as we walk and talk. This makes use of dialogue (which I identified as a strong contender for an audio paper subject matter) and incidental audio (which I had dismissed, but now seems to be of utmost importance). It also has ties with psycho-geography’s ‘flaneur’ as we would be walking purposelessly, letting the landscape guide us. In this way, it carries on from last years’ experiments and research. It’s also slightly absurd, treating footwear as this supremely important aspect of daily life, and suspending belief to read into how ones footwear infringes on their behavior or confidence. Although, perhaps it isn’t all that far from the truth.

But what questions do I ask? Here are a few off the top of the head:

How many shoes do you own?

Do you enjoy the sound of your shoes?

Do different shoes make you feel or act differently?

To what extent does the sound of a shoe impact your decision about whether to wear it or not?

Are you able to identify friends by the sound of their footsteps? What about family?

Attempting to zero-in on a topic for my impending audio paper has been an arduous task fraught with the echoes of future mid life crises – what am I even interested in? Is there anything that I stand for? What are my politics? Questions like these have chased themselves around my mind with a furious sense of hustle and bustle, but I did make some slight progress, detailed below.

I was musing on the nature of audio papers and in what scenarios an audio paper would suit better than a traditional (written) essay, and I felt that (, personally) dialogue was the most compelling argument for the usage of an audio paper. Consider the following; if you require sound effects or examples of archival audio, you could attach audio files to your written paper to be referred to at certain points within the text. The very nature of these audio ‘examples’ is to interrupt the text, to be focused on between moments of speech. However, conversation and the interactivity of the voice is something that cannot be faithfully simulated within a written body of text. Conversations constantly overlap, people cut off others’ sentences and interrupt, fight for their point to be heard and generally abuse the absurd notion that one line of text comes after the previous line; this is the flagrant lie that is sold to us by transcriptions of conversation.

Of course, I recognise that I’m overlooking many excellent and inspired techniques that could be utilised to brilliant effect in an audio paper context, but I am over-simplifying the matter so as to out-wit this option paralysis that I seem to be plagued with. I find that deceiving ones own mind in this manner proves to be a strong technique in combating mental freezes and erroneous blips in cognitive processing.

So; I have ascertained that conversational interaction will be dear to the heart of my audio paper. However it soon dawned on me that despite this sizeable revelation, I was still no closer to an actual definable topic, and even further away from some sort of conclusion.

In my one-on-one tutorial with Ingrid, she shed some light on the predicament and lent me a nugget of wisdom in the form of (and I paraphrase) ‘you seem to be thinking very introspectively’. This hit home. I was too bogged down in the personal, artistic side of things that I had completely negated to think academically, critically, questioningly (well perhaps I was thinking questioningly enough…). She asked what I was interested in (which set me off again on a whole series of crises, see paragraph 1 for more details) and with some difficulty I brought it back to the basics: surreal absurdism in everyday life, conversational peculiarity, and perhaps a dash of post punk (I’m currently invested in the London post punk scene, closely following it with the excitement of a bloodhound who has just caught smell of a large pile of herring circa. 1982, see fig 1. for more details on herring capture rates in the past 60 years).

Tying these together has been a real tough nut to crack. More specifically, what is the question that I am chasing? What is the topic that I am inquiring into, or documenting? I will be doing some more heavy thinking with less of a focus on self contained brooding, and will hopefully have something to show for it (a 200 word abstract is what Ingrid is pushing for) by next week.

The past couple of months have been a time of quiet introspection for numerous reasons, but one of the most recent things that I’ve become aware of is my delight over certain simple sounds. To list a few:

In the first Sound for Screen lecture (I missed the 2nd due to a rough case of the flu/a cold/a cough) Milo talked us through the evolution of audio within film. There was a focus on technology being one of the main factors in the creation of the most noteworthy moments within that canon, coupled (of course) with innovative thinkers making the most of those emergent technologies. Murray Spivack, Ben Burtt, Walter Murch, Alan Splet. More impressive speaker arrays seem to have been the largest driver (ha ha!) when it comes to improving film audio – films were first silent, then in mono, then in stereo, and now finally we enjoy films in surround as the norm although it seems that a variety of surround formats have been cycled through over the years.

Musing on this, framed by the feeling that I haven’t done much technical experimentation over the summer, I decided to do some mid/side recording of a few sources. My research goal was to assess how well M/S can ‘place’ a sound within the stereo field, and how effective it is at re-creating the sense of space within a room. This ties in to film audio as many amateur films are still done in stereo and I wanted to delve into the possibilities of implementing M/S techniques for stereo film work.

I set up a M/S array in a room and then played back (slower than recorded) some old live recordings of New Orleans stlye jazz on my Uher 4200 reel to reel, through the inbuilt speakers. I was taking a lot of creative license from The Caretaker’s “Everywhere At The End of Time”, as I felt that the recordings I posses evoked a similar sense of melancholy as the ballroom records used in that piece. For example, I played a lot with using delays and reverbs to abstract the sounds after they were recorded, and also was aurally projecting already recorded music in a different context.

I sat off to one side from the tape deck, went about my business and occasionally coughed a lung up as I recovered from my cough/cold/flu. These coughs and sniffles turned out to be a big focus of mine in the piece that came out of these experiments; they sounded feeble and sad, and recorded in M/S with me on the left and the tape deck on the right really situated the listener in the room, and brought a certain hushed quality to the recordings.

In terms of M/S being used for detailed imaging, I found that my recordings had very clear relative imaging (sounds being noticeably to the left or right of each other) even with very small changes in location, but on a single source I felt that I only got an indication of ‘width’ rather than an actual definite positioning of the object in space.

The added width and roominess definitely helped with creating that sense of melancholy that I was aiming for, and has made me consider re-amping things in mid/side in the future.

My writing tends to be distinctly excessive; a few blog posts ago I talked about self identifying with my own sociability and the ecstatic joy that comes from abusing the terminally obese human language, mixing obscure, pompous words with modern day slang to create a collage of linguistic contradictions. My curiosity lies, this time, in how much of this Wodehousian dialect I can use in my academic writing. Removing the ‘I’ from my writing was a challenge, but opened up a lot of doors when it comes to expressing sentences that would’ve had an ‘I then…’ or ‘this led me to…’ but instead require a measured dose of ‘consequently, the musings of _____ crest the horizon above the landscape of ____s writing, framing their ideas within a golden glow of pshychogeographical meandering’. I feel that I found room for lexical fun in my essay, although my time management left much to be desired in making sense of the tangled mess of ideas that I was tying to convey. The language may be interesting, but I fear that the essay itself is shrouded in ambiguity birthed from my (seemingly) genetic disposition to ignore deadlines until T-minus-C, ‘C’ in this equation referring to the minimum number of hours it would take to complete the assignment, and T referring to 3pm on a Thursday; the universal hand-in time for all work.

The conclusion is really the most important part of an essay, although ones conclusion should be apparent from the outset. Treating ones academic writing like a murder mystery novel is an erroneous undertaking, withholding the enlightening statement until the final paragraph to be unveiled with a “and I would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for you meddling kids” is immature and unprofessional. But then how, I ask, am I to plan my essay so thoroughly that I know where I will end up before I get there? Writing, for me, is a transformative process in which my ideas, by being committed to the page, arrange themselves to sit alongside each other. I feel that links and connections between ideas occur on a macro level, employing specific, delicate wordings and lexical leaps of faith to convey the gossamer threads of intrigue and internal discovery that make an essay worth reading. I hope sincerely that the conclusion to my essay will make itself apparent sooner or later. The lack of an initial question within the title leaves the conclusion in a slightly ambiguous place. I am confident that I will triumph over the conclusion.

//written on paper 6 days prior to this post//