When I first read our course syllabus and saw we would have a week on Sound, I was like, “No way!” In undergrad, I took two courses focused on sound and music technology: “Soundscapes” and “Acoustic Ecology”. In these courses, we created very similar sound compositions using both found and created sounds which is why you'll see other uploads on my SoundCloud.
Because of my previous experience, I thought this week would be a piece of cake. I was wrong. 5 years ago, when I made all my soundscapes, I used GarageBand and Logic Pro. Now that I have a PC, using those programs would be impossible. Instead, I decided to try Audacity. Not only is it free, but it works on both Mac AND Windows, making it a more accessible resource for schools! I watched a few tutorials and asked my brother for help, but I had a lot of trouble figuring out Audacity without a dedicated music tech expert helping me step by step. To avoid students encountering similar issues, I would dedicate a class session to learning the program before having them work on their compositions in the next session, so they could easily receive in-person assistance.
I also ran into trouble with how I approached making my recordings. I recorded audio on my phone (no issues there), but rather than making lots of individual recordings of purposeful sounds, I chose to take 3 long recordings of my morning routine and my 12-minute outdoor excursion. My reasoning for this was that longer recordings would better capture the atmosphere of the spaces I inhabited, but picking through them in Audacity was time-consuming and inefficient. After 2 hours of cutting down my recordings and labeling individual sounds, I gave up and decided to pivot. I looked at the length of my first track after editing, 1:27, and then spliced every remaining track at that same exact time. All the excess audio that went past 1:27, I pasted into new tracks until I had 14 tracks of the same length. After compressing all the audio, I added fades at the beginning and end, then called it a day. Though the layering of the sounds in my composition ended up more random than individually thought out, I feel they somehow work with the prompt, creating a more natural soundscape of my environment.
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