PP2 SONIC PORTRAITS
Since my last blog post, heaps of stuff had happened for PP2 Sonic portraits! I've met Geoffrey Barlett and he turned out to be an amazing person. outside the actual recording and interview, i talked to him about his views on art and he was interested in Singapore's political scene, so we had a long chat.
During the chat, Geoff actually inspired me back to art. I was quite jaded for the longest time and actually proclaimed that i "hated" art or anything artistic. When i was young, i used to be in the singapore's young artist's club and was one of their student leaders, i paved my way to become an artist and was very interested in anything creative;thats why i enrolled for a diploma in film after high school. But somewhere along the way, I got too caught up in the technical aspects of stuff and got interested in sound. Also, in singapore, despite the massive amount of money spent in the arts, artists don't get the respect they deserve, yes people do respect and appreciate them but artists in singapore were not seen as doing anything 'real'
I grew to believe that too but fail to realize that art plays avery very important role in society, culture and being human.
After the chat with Robbie and Geoff, I learnt to embrace what i like again. to see things beyond their surface. This, of course, helped with my sonic portraits.
The recording for the interview was not fantastic. I was overconfident, despite the fact that i had not did field recording for over a year now. I used the zoom H2 and my own Sennheiser Dynamic microphone with a XLR to 3.5mm TRS adaptor that i made myself. the problem with the adaptor is that it's actually for use in events to send a stereo signals over an XLR cable to be converted back to a stereo TRS connection. that means for the XLR :pin 1 is gnu, pin 2 is left and pin 3 is right. but for a microphone's balanced signal , pin 1 is gnu, pin 2 is positive signal and pin 3 is a return terminal, which is usually a phase inverted signal to cancel out noise picked up. to cut a long story short, my recording is out of phase. I knew i could solve this by taking out the right channel so i went ahead. haha. BUT, it could have been so so so so much better if the techs would have let me booked out the zoom H4, which have XLR inputs and a much better mic preamp.
Also, During the recording, i sound checked the signal using my voice and I was more worried about clipping than a bad signal. In fact, the levels on the H2 showed up good and i didn't think the floor waxing upstairs would serve as a problem as i'm only using a dynamic mic. furthermore, Geoff didn't apper to like having a mic near his face, so he talked away from it, it was quite fun trying to point the mic at his mouth ; like a game.
The recording was not fantastic , but it was useable.
During the edit, I was thinking about how i could bring out the beauty of Geoff's work through this sound piece. So i have the idea of converting pictures of his sculptures into sound! By using a spectrogram we can view this images as a waveform. basically the sound waves will show up as something like this.
original picture:
Spectrogram screen capture:
By doing this, the listeners subconsciously 'listens' to his works. Furthermore, The sounds produced by pictures have a random, futuristic sound , and fits nicely into the look of his works.
All of us had already present our work in class and received plentiful of feedback from Robbie and the class. I does make me realize where i have gone wrong and in which areas i need improvement. One thing is , i added too much reverb to Geoff's dialogue and should chill on the effects, another thing is that i have to cut down the background music (which is basically the Am and Em chords on keyboard.) and use the music to compliment the narrative rather than to drive the emotions of it. I don't want to augment the original emotions that was already in Geoff's voice. I've got a bit of editing to do and need to remix the piece and clean up the edit and sound.
I was advised to concentrate more on the Spectrogram sounds and use it as the main theme of the piece and work on it. now i got to find a way to vend it in so that it will be obvious when run through a spectrogram, but not obvious enough to overthrow the narrative. It's both challenging and fun and i sure learnt a lot from this project!
