This week we had ANOTHER guest lecture!  It’s like Christmas!!!  We had Kyla Brettle speak to us about how to create a good audio piece.

A look into the future: Media 1 Lecture Week 12

The best piece of advice, in my opinion, is to take audio as it comes rather than trying to plan the overall picture.  When it comes to creative work, I’m a ‘big picture’ kind of person.  Many of the films I’ve made have been planned so meticulously that if something goes wrong, or is merely not what I thought it’d be, I get very stressed out and try to find ways to fix it (even if nothing needs to be fixed).  Especially in a medium such as audio, where background noise may interfere, or the sound of an object or someones voice does not translate the way you hoped when recorded, it is crucial to keep your head and not choose to complete get rid of that audio and start again.  It may be helpful later in the project, or later in your career.

Another helpful piece of advice was not to use music for no reason.  I am definitely someone who connects a lot of emotion and meaning to music (I Gotta Feeling by The Black-Eyed Peas is a sad song and NOBODY can convince me otherwise), but using music (especially music with lyrics) can make the audio muddy if used merely for the sake of music.  It can actually be more effective to have complete silence.  Music has to have an aural purpose, even if it is merely aesthetics, and also one must assume that it will be interpreted in different ways (I GOTTA FEELING IS A SAD SONG AND YOU ALL KNOW IT!)

I want you to imagine that you’re getting ready to go to a club.  Your life changed in a major way recently.  In a negative way.  You have been suppressing these negative emotions.  Over the past few months, you have been drowning your sorrows with dancing at clubs, random, meaningless hookups, and lots of alcohol.  Momentarily, you have a simulated feeling of happiness, but there is an emptiness to it.  You are getting ready to go out.  You try to convince yourself “this is the night everything changes”.  You know it is not.
(This is the first thing I thought when I heard the song.  I would have been 11 or 12.  Neither myself nor my immediate family and friends (that I was aware of) had had any of these experiences.  I don’t know where all this came from.  But it is definitely a sad song)

Kyla showed us some pieces of audio she had recorded, and also some of her favourite audio pieces.  The most affecting sound for me was the interview with the woman who had served in war, describing what her friend had said while he was dying, thinking he was talking to his wife.  It was purely an interview, and yet felt as though we were watching a film like Saving Private Ryan.  The audio helped the audience to be in that moment, with the interviewee.

I definitely think this lecture has helped me to reconsider how I see audio, and how I approach it too.  It requires a more gentle, cautious hand that video editing (in my opinion, but I call my personal brand of video editing ” reckless editing”.  It’s not exactly a careful art form for me).