Nicholas McLaughlin Blog

Class 01

My introduction to soundscapes. Music and sound have always been a big part of my life, but I’ve never given the everyday sounds the focus I should have. I play video games and watch movies and always direct my focus on the score. I am aware of ambient sound but have yet to truly understand its power to paint the environment or convey information about that environment.
Or how specific isolated sounds could be used in a creative space or medium, that sound itself is the art and can stand alone to convey the artists’ intentions.

Going out on the streets of Glasgow with the H1n tuned me into the everyday sounds I have tuned out and how much information or emotion they convey. I’m guilty of always using my headphones at a loud volume because I love the music or the noise, so I’ve either missed this sound or forgotten about it. So even when I wasn’t using the directional listening of the H1n, I decided to keep my headphones off and keep listening and to focus on the sounds; people talking, the wind in the trees, the different soles of shoes on other surfaces and people living their lives around the city.

Self Learning 01

Even at home this evening, I listened to the different sounds more intently and heard things I had never noticed before with the H1n, like the mechanism inside my door that I’d been opening and closing for years.

Or enjoying the sound of the planes I’ve learned to tune out after years.

Class 02

Audio Editing. Previously I’ve used Adobe Audition for the bare minimum, but after spending a couple of hours with it, I can see how complex it could be.
I have focused on how some audio can sound empty and clinical without ambient noise and how the world around us is never really silent. So I want to make sure my project has that reality of the natural world if that’s what it’s trying to replicate.

Self Study 02

I’ve gone out to capture the noises that most people ignore or tune out daily to tell the story of my daily journey and how even a short sound or snippet of a giant sound can communicate a location or situation.

The direction of the audio in speakers or headphones is something I want to focus on because it’s something I’ve always enjoyed since hearing it in Space Oddity, giving the illusion of being surrounded by music.

Self Study 03 (Kind of)

Well, I tried to do work on Wednesday, but that didn’t go to plan.
The H1n micro SD was corrupted, and I lost a lot of audio, so I couldn’t record any of the audio I wanted to in my house for the beginning of the soundscape.
I then decided that if I couldn’t work with the recorder, I would work on what I could using my laptop, but in another stroke of genius, I had left my charger in the AV room, so my laptop was dead, and I lost a day of productiveness. Lovely.

Self Study 04

The first thing in the studio was to get the recorder fixed and the laptop charged. Done.
With the limited time I had left, I decided to change my soundscape; because I already had the audio of the planes over my house; I used that as a starting point to build the soundscape of an airport runway around it. The soundscape differs from my initial choice, but I still wanted to carry through aspects I liked and could with the time constraints, such as communicating a journey, even if it is a bit smaller—the journey from inside the airport, out onto the tarmac and then into the plane.
My initial idea was intended to exaggerate reality to make it more engaging and expressive instead of listening to a train ride for 20 minutes and steady walking for 10 minutes.
I’ve applied that thinking here by making the runway overly busy and dynamic whilst still based on reality.

Final

With the runway, we start inside the airport coming out to the wave of noise and activity with trucks, engines, runway workers and planes flying overhead to populate this busy runway before heading upstairs to the cabin ready to board the plane. In theory, it seems like a quick small journey that nearly everyone has done but by drawing attention to the sounds big and small I wanted to capture the whole experience and maybe excitement.