This week we focused on sound and the idea of hearing/listening. The thing I struggled with the most in the last project brief was the quality of sound, so it was good to learn about it in more in-depth terms.
A couple of weeks back we look at the idea of ‘noticing’ and this was brought back this week, but in terms of sound. The difference between actively listening and simply hearing is very distinct once the idea is brought to your attention, and once you start actively listening you become aware that silence doesn’t really exist. Just sitting in my room writing this blog post I can hear birds outside, the faint sound of the TV playing in the lounge room, the honk of a train in the distance, a car passing by….. The list goes on.
This is something I should have thought about more when interviewing my subject for Brief 3. Because i was focusing on listening to him speak i didn’t hear all of the other background noise captured by the microphone until I uploaded the footage onto my iMovie. In the future some experimentation with different microphones could be beneficial, as I can see now that the lapel microphone would have been more suitable in the situation.
