What we did on our Site weekend

Over this weekend we managed to potentially finalise our audio, ready to be sent out on Monday evening. Due to technical issues we had to push back the public release date of the audio from saturday afternoon to monday. We had planned to have a media student record and edit our audio so it sounded professional (and as none of us had ever had any experience with audio editing before), however we were informed that they had exams and were unable to help. This left us in a rather worrying situation as we had four complete audio novices, and two days until the public release. We decided to use the audio editing program Audacity that I had downloaded on my Mac.

Before we could start recording we edited the script with the improvements that we were given during our trial run. We found formulating clear conversational directions particulally challenging (especially around Minster Yard / The White Hart Hotel), and we often fell back into the habit of speaking like a ‘sat-nav’ rather than a companion.

Because I was the only one with Audacity on their computer, editing the recordings and exporting them to Mp3 files was my job. For me this weekend consisted of placing the recordings together, adding sound effects, getting the timings right, editing out background noise etc. It took a long time, was extremely tedious, and often tested my sanity, however it meant that we had a recording that was available for downloading – not necessarily to the quality or standard that we had hoped – but a recording none the less. We then trialled the audio in the site, and the timings were much better.

Download

When things don’t quite go to plan…

The first day we tried out our audio as a group in the space together didn’t go as planned, quite frankly we couldn’t have picked a worse day. There was a parade of soldiers for the allied food drop at site number 1, the steps were being painted and therefore out of use and there were a team of builders sat on the green, horse and cart rides around the site and unexpected company at site 2! However, this is the beauty of site, it allowed us to plan what would happen if this was our performance and also realise the site obviously isn’t just for our use as the weather gets warmer there is bound to be more people around which we have discussed could be interesting if we were to be approached. We also discovered faults in our audio which we can rectify such as tone of voice and some sound effects which did not work. More recently I have been looking into Fortnight and their understanding of theatre as a “theatrical intervention into … daily lives” (Hui, 2011) which is exactly what we want to achieve and therefore today helped us to see how we could overcome any boundaries that stop us from achieving this. Fortnight understands that “works of art are meant to provoke affective responses – to move and push people to new understandings and new relations” (Hui, 2011) which is exactly what we intend to do with our walk.

After we listened to our audio with Rachel we realised we needed to change our audio slightly. This is so we gauged the correct tone of voice, chatty style of conversation and informality needed to make the audience feel comfortable. Editing this was quite hard so we had the idea to voice record our rehearsal as we felt it was hard to write a conversational script therefore we could talk about the site and write it based on what we said in an informal conversation, almost verbatim like. This friendly, informal tone of our new recording reminded us of our earlier research of audio talks because of the sound effect used in the back ground, we were thinking we should do something similar we felt it adds a sense of intimacy for the audience.

 

Hui, A. (2011) Art as an everyday intervention: shifting times, places and mobilities in the pervasive media performance project “Fortnight”. The Association of American Geographers’ Conference, New York, 25 February 2012 [unpublished].