Author: Joseph Paul Cooper

For this module I was tasked to make a soundscape within a group of 3-4. I ended up working with Luke Scott and Charlie Thorne and we decided to make a Musical Concrète soundscape called Tranquil to Turmoil which focused on the contrast between tranquil sounds and turmoil; calm and chaotic. The first assignment for this task was to make a powerpoint presentation to pitch our initial idea for our soundscape, Tranquil to Turmoil. This gave me an insight into what it was going to be like to work as a group, organising group meetings to work on the work, preparation, research etc.

Once we had completed assignment one we then had to actually go about and create the soundscape. This meant more organising time together as a group to discuss the sounds we wanted to capture, where we were going to record and when we were to record. Once this was all done, again, it was all about finding a time to meet to work on our soundscape together. The majority of the time we worked individually and then met to show each what we had which actually worked incredibly well.

Over the course of this module we were taught how to use Pro-Tools which was great because at the beginning I knew nothing about Pro-Tools and now I can safely safe that I would be more than comfortable working within Pro-Tools. Another great thing about being Pro-Tools is that it meant everyone in our group could use Pro-Tools so that meant integrating individual different sections of the soundscape could be done much easier.

As well as making the actual soundscape we also had to manage a blog and post to it every time we worked on something for the final piece. I did the majority of the posting to the blog, however I never posted on the same day in which I worked on something. I would rather begin the post with the actual date I did work on something, this was easier for me as it meant I could spend a few days reflecting on what I had done and I could form it into words focusing on mentioning the more important aspects and ignoring the irrelevant. Looking back at the blog I wish I posted every time I learnt something knew in a workshop when working with Pro-Tools as this would have been a great indication for my learning over the course of the past few weeks.

I feel like my weakness in this project was not knowing Pro-Tools which was very quickly solved with the workshops. Another weakness is the fact that I am not the biggest of fans when it comes to working in a group and would much prefer to work as an individual. However I feel like I overcame this struggle and managed to come together with my group, taking in ideas and giving feedback to them to produce a piece at the very end that we were all happy with.

-Joseph Cooper

Friday 15th December

This was our last group meeting. We spent a couple of hours together working on our individual pieces, mine being from 30 seconds to 1 min 30. Once we all were nearly finished we listened to everyone’s individual piece and gave feedback to each other. Once we finalised each individual piece we exported them and pieced them together into one final Pro-Tools project. In this project we used different sounds from each others work to make risers and sweeps to make transitioning between the pieces sounds more coherent. When everything was finished the final piece was exported as a stereo MP3 at 320 kbps.

Once that was done we decided to go away and write a timing script for the part we individually worked on because that made the most sense. When everyone had finished their script it was sent to me and I compiled all the documents into one word document, which contained the blog link as well. I then put this document and the finished soundscape MP3 into a zipped folder and correctly named it.

-Joseph Cooper

Tuesday 12th December

Our group met up to share out the audio files that had been recorded previously. Once this had been done the project was then divided up between the three of us. Before the meeting I had worked out that if we were to make our soundscape at 152BPM and it be 76 bars long then it would be exactly 2 minutes. This is good because our soundscape features two main concepts, Turmoil and Tranquil. This way each concept could have exactly one minute each, exactly 38 bars each, meaning because we chose to do a music concrète piece then the rhythm could stick to 4/4 without there being any weird timing issues.

The way that we split up our project is that I would work on creating the turmoil section and Charlie and Luke would work on the Tranquil section. The Tranquil section would then be split up into two 30 second sections, an intro and an outro. When this was all decided we all started to work on our own individual sections.

I managed to create a small 2 bar drumbeat for the Turmoil section using a kick of a bin as a kick drum, a metal pole being struck in a large open space for a reverberated snare and then a beep from a lift as percussion.

Thursday 7th December

On this day our group came together to gather sounds for our soundscape. We started on the university campus and then ventured into the city centre before heading back to where we started. Once we had finished we had collected around 46 minutes of recordings. The next task was to go through each recording and pick out sounds we liked for both the tranquil section as well as the turmoil section.

An issue I encountered when recording on this day was the amount of wind there was and the amount of people that were in the city centre. This meant I had to be really patient to get the sounds I really wanted. As well as this, the portable audio recorder ran out of battery mid way through our recording session. This meant I had to go and buy some extra batteries so we could continue recording.

-Joseph Cooper

Wednesday 22nd November

Feedback for our group presentation was uploaded to blackboard on this day. We were able to see what grade we scored (I scored a 68/100) and we were also able to see the breakdown of the grading and we were left with some comments on how we could improve. In the feedback it says that our piece seems like two rather than one.

“However, your concept feels like two pieces rather than one. You have the mindfulness piece, then you have the sound effects/Foley/processed piece.”

Using this feedback, as a group, we were able to talk about the exact route we wanted to take our project.

-Joseph Cooper