Melody and Veronica's Tech Project 2019!
The Planning Process
We started off this project indecisive of what we wanted to make! Some of the ideas and inspirations we had were:
Compose catchy ringtones using Sonic Pi (inspired by Rebecca’s guest lecture) and build a website guiding students on how to make their own
Building some sort of interactive music-related website/game e.g. Incredibox, Isle of Tune etc.
Both options would involve a decent amount of knowledge in computer coding, which we were excited to learn but would’ve had no idea where to start!
Upon researching potential ideas for our project, we came across a video of a guy who made music purely out of sounds heard in a dry cleaner and we thought that was pretty cool so decided to make our own!
Here’s our project idea that we decided to lock in!
Compose a short comp using found objects you would find in a classroom and make a website resource guiding students on creating their own found sound comp. The pedagogy behind our project is to have a hands-on experience with recording equipment, use technology in a creative way while encouraging students to do the same.
Before beginning the composition process, we first brainstormed a number of classroom found objects that we could record and make music with! (The highlighted objects are the ones we ended up using!)
The Recording Process
Once we sorted all the found objects we were about to record, we plugged the condenser microphone into an audio interface, which was connected to the PC (with Logic Pro X open). Recording sounds did not take long, however a number of sounds ended up being barely audible e.g. the whiteboard marker, the printer and therefore we used a compressor within Logic to boost the gain. We recorded the rest of the sounds using two pencil mics in xy position.
The Composing Process
We started the composition with our recorded ‘typing’ sounds looped in the background to “set the scene”. Next, we wanted to introduce a sound that imitated a kick drum - our audio sample of a ‘water bottle hitting a hand’ was most suited for this role. Similarly, we looped the sound across several bars and boosted the lower frequencies using an EQ for more of a ‘punchy’ effect. On top of that, we added in the recording of a zipper as a snare, and a pencil case, imitating an egg shaker. To all of these sounds, we used the fade tool to fade in and out, getting rid of unwanted ‘clicks’ from chopped audio samples. It was a working drum beat, but we were missing some melodic material. We looked at our samples and decided the “twang” from the pen hitting the stand was the source with most melodic potential. Placing the “twang” into a sampler on Logic (EXS24), we improvised on top of our looped drum beat using a midi keyboard.
Listening back to our composition a little while later, we decided to make some slight changes. The “bass drum” was introduced too suddenly and quickly. Our solution was to lengthen the typing at the beginning of the comp. Secondly, the constant water bottle bass drum sound became very boring after a while. Our solution was to record a different sound as a bass - we ended up recording a chair thud and changing up the bass rhythm. After fixing these issues, we were unsure of how to finish the comp so we took some material in what we’ve composed so far and reused those sounds in new ways e.g. taking the water bottle bass drum, panning the sound and adding an EQ sweep to it as the music climbs towards the climax. We also introduced new sounds e.g. the “page flip”, putting it through a sampler and playing it as semiquavers. Similar to the stand “twang”, we processed the printer sound through a sampler and used it as a melodic chordal instrument to improvise with. It ended up complementing the composition very well. Lastly, one of the most important lessons we learnt in the composition process was to colour code our tracks and label them as we go as it definitely improved workflow...
Once we finished composing the piece, we planned to move on to working on our website resource. However, listening to the composition over and over, we decided it was more suitable and beneficial if we made a video to go with the composition instead. We had no idea where to begin, but eager to learn new skills, we decided to give it a go!
The Filming Process
A video we had in mind of what we wanted it to look like was Andrew Huang’s Song Challenge ‘Apple Music’ (making music using different tone colours made from an apple). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLjyiG2U21Y Here, a split-screen effect was used to showcase all the ways the apples were manipulated. So, with our trusty iPhones, we recorded short videos of all the layers we used, intending to edit and loop them to match up with the audio.
The Video Editing Process
The video editing process was very very eye-opening (we are both complete beginners), but also very very frustrating. The first problem we came across was that it was incredibly hard to match video with audio. We didn’t seem to be able to zoom in enough to move the video just that tiny bit to the left/right (like trying to get the shower temperatures just right). All seemed hopeless so we considered doing a one-take recording of each layer and putting it together, but...the solution was simply slowing down the audio! The composition ended up going from 132bmp to 120bmp and it made a massive difference in having the video and audio more accurately aligned.
As for the program we used - we tried using Filmora first (because they have split-screen templates), but couldn’t loop the videos within the split-screen. Also (maybe it was just us) but Filmora took ages to pause during playback and this made editing very inconvenient. Next up was iMovie and all was going great...until we tried to add a 3rd video layer and it was impossible to. So then, we started all over again, using Screenflow and then we regretted not just using Humbo’s suggestion in the first place. I guess we learnt the hard way! It was so smooth, I could copy and paste bits of video easily (in other programs it was a nightmare dragging the pasted video into the specific video layer I wanted)
In Filmora we had the opportunity to experiment with lots of features e.g. cropping clips to make the split screen effect, speeding up/slowing down clips, creating transitions (that conveniently made some editing flaws less obvious) and highlighted musical elements (e.g. ‘copy machine’ transition for the printer, ‘jaws wipe’ transition to dramatise the ending.) Features we wish we knew earlier were ‘lock clips’ (because it is so easy to accidentally drag something and never realise) and sliding one clip over another (rather than cropping one and lengthening another). A features we wish exists are slow motion playback (to really get down to the itty-gritty details).
However, when the post-drop semiquaver page flips came in...Screenflow/our Macbooks could not handle it. Video playback became extremely laggy and it was impossible to monitor how the alignment of the audio and video was going. Our first step to tackle this was to create 2 Screenflow documents - one pre-drop and one post-drop. It improved dramatically, but it was never really perfect. By the end, we had to export the video to be able to check how the alignment was going...make changes...then export again to check. This is why there are still quite some flaws in our video. Also due to all the exporting, we now know that the fastest possible encoding quality is crucial to getting it to align well - the first time it was exported with the normal encoding quality, the video was disappointingly dreadful. Before the PoL, we hope to be able to do some final tweaking with the computers at the Con (which can hopefully handle the page flippin semiquavers) and export the full video without the watermark.
Melody and Veronica
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