SOUND

The term ‘sound art’ is about as irrelevant as the term ‘visual art’.

• When starting to work with sound, don’t be too daunted by all the information and all the technology. First-hand experience is always best, so speak to people, and don’t forget the internet. Experiment and learn.
• Don’t be tempted to buy your way out of a creative hole with more equipment: sometimes you can create your best work with the limitations of what you have (I created my first sound works using a cheap digital dictaphone, a £15 condenser mic and free mixing software).
• That said, good studio monitors for mixing are a must! Mixing in headphones is not only bad for your ears, but also for your mix.
• Download a recording app for your phone to get the best possible sound from it.
• If working with computers, remember there are some good free/cheap digital audio workstations out there so you don’t need to spend a fortune to start.
• If you can’t find the answer to a recording problem, use YouTube! Thankfully there are plenty of geeky boys and girls out there who love nothing more than explaining how to use software.
• Try final mixes on a variety of speakers (preferably some low quality too) to get a good picture of what it will sound like to most people.
• Be careful with your ears – once your hearing is damaged, it won’t recover.
• Remember volume does not always equal power. You can hear subtleties in quieter work that will be lost at higher volumes.
• Read In Search of Concrete Music by Pierre Schaeffer. An entertaining, heart-warming and enlightening read from the grandfather of Musique Concrète.

Recording in the field

Essential kit (for everyday use)

In a waterproof bag (then you are prepared for all weather eventualities):

• A portable recorder (with built in mics is fine)
• Other portable technical equipment you love (tape recorder, Dictaphone, etc.)
• Recorder wind shield
• Tripod (mini tripods are useful for lodging your recorder in nooks and crannies)
• Spare batteries (these machines always use more energy than you expect)
• Contact mics
• Camera (or camera phone) and charger
• Notebook and loose paper (lined and plain)
• Various pens and pencils
• Tape and string
• Scissors or army knife
• Mini screwdriver kit
• Water and food – don’t give up on your explorations because of a rumbling stomach (which will also affect your recordings!)

When recording in the field in a populated place, try to be discreet (binaural or lavalier microphones can be good for this) and, most of all, respectful. Recording in public can arouse the suspicions of the general public and thus ruin your recordings. (Being approached by a policeman whilst recording a great set of church bells can be very annoying!).

• Also be aware of ethics – recording private conversations can be problematic! You may hear things you’d rather not hear…
• Visit la Casa del Suono (The House of Sound), in Parma, Italy.

ANALOG AND DIGITAL

Put 10 sound specialists in a room and they will argue for hours about which is best.

The main distinction: Analog sound is how we hear sound. Analog recording records the full information about every sound wave – reproducing the variations sound makes in air onto a recording medium. Digital sound records a digital representation of an analog signal. Using Pulse-code Modulation (PCM), it takes a sample of where the wave is at, a number of times each second (the sample rate) and records this as data. The unit of the sampling rate is Hz. So a 16,000 Hz recording has taken 16,000 samples of the sound each second. It then plays this back to us and our ears do not detect the missing bits. The higher the sampling rate, the better the quality, the larger the file size.

• This does not necessarily mean analog produces better listening sound than digital. There are too many other factors involved, but it does record more information about the sound.
• People choose to keep masters on tape because this has all the information you can get about a sound. You can make several digital variations from this analog recording.
• Digital sound can be compressed for storage and playback variations: data compression (codecs – lossy and lossless) and dynamic range compression.
• If sound quality is a major factor in the work, and the quality of your recording is good, try not to compress the audio. WAV files are most commonly associated with uncompressed audio.
• Detail and quality is always reduced with compression, but you need to determine if this matters, based on the specs of your recording device and the specs of the set-up for which you are delivering the sound. Always think about what you will be playing your sound on: speakers, drivers, amps, cable, will limit/boost quality.
• When making digital versions, like with video, there is no point in delivering a file at a higher quality than your recording device was able to capture – this is just going to increase your file size. For example: if you record with a device capable of recording at 8,000Hz there, is no point in later encoding with 11,025 Hz.

If you amplify shit, it’s just louder shit. Old sound engineer saying

Analog

Digital 8,000 Hz

Digital 16,000 Hz

FUN FACTS

• The speed of sound (in air) is approx. 340 metres per second.
• Sound travels in waves. It has to travel in a medium (like air). It is the result of a vibrating object (vocal cords/guitar string/drum) causing the particles of the surrounding medium (air) to vibrate. How frequently the particles vibrate as the wave passes through the medium is called the frequency. We hear frequency as pitch. High frequency = high pitch = ‘tight’ wave. We measure this frequency, by the second, in Hertz (Hz). 1 Hz = 1 vibration/second.
• We measure other things in Hz. Don’t let it confuse you: it is just a unit of frequency.
• Babies can ‘hear’ frequencies between 20Hz and 20,000 Hz. As we get older, we cannot perceive the higher frequencies above around 16,000 Hz. Cats hear up to around 64,000Hz; dolphins can hear up to around 150,000 Hz; elephants hear as low as 16 Hz and their calls go as low as 5Hz – we suspect that they ‘listen’ to the vibrations through the earth with their feet.
• Some low frequency vibrations cause nausea. Cool.
• The threshold of hearing this is the faintest sound we can hear. It is the sound of particles of air moving one billionth of a centimetre.

Hope is for the hopeless just like work is for the useless. Shahin Afrassiabi