Assignment 3.1: Collecting Specific Types of Sounds


Assignments: 1.1 | 1.2 | 1.3 | 2.1 | 2.2 | 3.1 | 3.2 | 3.3 | 4.1 | 4.2 | 4.3 | 4.4 | 5.1


Collect the following categories of sounds. Use the best possible recording equipment you can lay your hands on.

1. Two 30 minute "long" continuous recordings. These should be uniform in the medium scale: not like a hair drier which is uniform in too small a scale, and not necessarily like half an episode of CSI, which doesn't necessarily vary from beginning to end; but more like a film, or traffic, or walking down Mass Ave, or walking through MIT (not just the infinite but various buildings), or the airport where lots of things happen, or a decent TV episode where things progress or at least change, or traveling on the T. etc. Ultimately these sounds might be chopped into smaller pieces and layered, and used as something to convolve with smaller samples (not this week, though).

2. Ten 5 second "scenes." These are not like your short sounds from Assignment 1.1, which were of specific things. These scenes are more like capturing 5 seconds of "somewhere," like a random 5 seconds in Starbucks (or, better still, Dado or Pamplona), or in a lecture. Later these might be chopped into different sized pieces, and some parts crossfaded together to produce a short (20-30 second) changing sound, and used as something to convolve with smaller samples (not this week).

3. Ten distinctly "noisy" sounds, as short or long as you like. These will be used to make both horizontal (linear), temporally changing noise that is not dense, and vertical dense noise (not this week). You can steal some of these from recordings, etc. (Within the confines of MIT this is permitted as "fair use.")

4. Five potential distinctly "beautiful" sounds. This is of course subjective, but nice chords will work, etc. These will later be the short samples for the convolutions described above. If you can't find enough beautiful sounds this week, they can be constructed next week from simpler sources, like piling together transposed versions of single notes. Again, you can steal some of these from recordings, etc.

So, just do these recordings, edit them, remove unwanted clicks and abrupt beginnings and endings, and leave them in the appropriate folders in the ass-3.1 folder, which is a little more complicated than usual.

5. Read what is required of Class 3.2, and if you don't like drawing or generally making a mess with pastels, bring along some colored or black-and-white pictures copied or downloaded from somewhere, or created by someone else or by yourself. Wear sensible clothes!