Week 4

Peer Review

 The theme of the week 4 lecture was how creative practice develops and improves by being shared with others who, in turn, provide a positive and objective critique.  Our challenge was to present the progress of our work to date and gain feedback that will assist our reflective practice.

 I am particularly curious how an audience will engage with a non-curated sound piece and decided to seek the reactions of my peers to the sound recording of grouse uploaded on week 2’s blog.  I asked 3 questions:

 “Describe what you hear?”

 As a group who are not familiar with birdsong and calls I was interested in how they might identify the sounds heard: various intonations of the birds as well as the ambient wind.

 “Describe what emotions if any you felt?”

 Ultimately, I should like the final work to be emotive and my interest in asking this question was to judge if there had been an emotional response and how the listeners would describe this

 Then after the clip finished I asked people to indicated how long they thought it lasted.  Would the listeners become impatient, distracted or would their attention be held?

 In response to the first question: some listeners tried to name the species of bird but didn’t seem unduly concerned that they were not provided with this information. The background sound of the wind was interpreted widely as wind, water, road and sea.

 A specific technical piece of feedback was the wind sound was too overpowering, rendering the bird sounds as secondary.  It was suggested that I try and record the birds with as little background sound as possible and then add a separate ambient track of wind sound to get a better balance and more nuance.  See below…

 I loved the feedback regarding the listeners’ emotional responses: for one the clip evoked a sense of “isolation”, another felt “they were interrupting a family conversation”, another felt happy as she thought the “birds are laughing- having a family discourse” and similarly, another felt “content” and “smiled- there was no malice”.  This feedback was so encouraging.

 In terms of time: I played one minute of the clip and the estimates varied from 30 secs to 90 secs with a couple people mentioning that they would be happy to have listened longer.

Parabola and stereo clippy microphones on a misty Fiend’s Fell

 Response:

 Next morning, pre-dawn, with a favourable low wind forecast I had another go at recording the grouse from the same spot.  The result below was one of several recordings and used the parabola directional mic in a similar way to the original (see photo).  As an added bonus the recording also captured the flyover of migrating fieldfares on route from Scandinavia to the lower pastures below in the Eden Valley.  I think the isolation of the bird calls is improved and in a later post will create a multilayered sound sequence as suggested.

A fieldfare photographed by the author the previous year

 Further Reflection:

 The absence of wind sound had the disadvantage of not masking the distant road sound which grew gradually more disruptive as dawn broke.  While initially irritated by this it did cause me to reflect on if I should include anthropomorphic sound into the final work.  Make it more of a deliberate inclusion.  I shall experiment with this.