This week we were asked to create a short sound piece or audio installation with a partner.

Kevin and I both had partners that dropped a few days before the audio samples were due, so we thought we’d try to come up with something “simple.” We both like voice/opinion montages, and we also thought it would be good to have experience “interviewing” people, so we came up with the idea to ask people the question: What is your favorite food.

I had a bit of a learning curve with getting the samples. I quickly found that turning the mic on right away, rather than giving people some time to think of a “good” answer, led to more complex answers.

When we went to edit we had around around 50 samples. After listening to them, we decided on a basic story line, then sorted the samples based on that story line. Then we went to edit…

Neither of us had used Logic Pro before, but we did have a very little bit of audio/video editing experience, so the interface wasn’t completely foreign. Nonetheless, the first hour was spent just figuring out the interface, and although we got quicker and quicker, I’d say we spent at least half of our time on Google figuring out how to do things.

The beginning and middle were really fun to put together, but we struggled on the ending. Although we thought we knew the story, we both felt like the ending was just falling off. In our final edit, we added the “Breakfast Club” moment (“Does that answer your question?) back in and we finally felt we had a bit of an ending. Hopefully our classmates agree!

When the story was locked we used Noise Gate to even out the levels, then we got some room tone from freesounds.org to fill in the bottom. We also made sure the samples running at the same time were on different tracks so they would play from different speakers to create a stereo effect. We tested it in our classroom and the effect adds a lot to the piece. It would be nice to create this same effect with a few more speakers.

The audio could certainly be cleaned up more, but we think it’s in pretty good shape. Here ’tis!

Cover photo by CLF.