Reflections on Assignment 2
During this practice, I was mainly responsible for recording the sounds and the post-production work. In my opinion, this journey is far more than just a technical exercise; it is also a profound auditory training and a philosophical practice of having an intimate conversation with the surrounding environment.
At the beginning of the project, I was confident in the equipment in my hands, but I underestimated the practice required for "listening". The initial recordings were filled with unconscious haste - I was "collecting sounds" rather than "communicating with the soundscapes". So later, I adjusted my mindset. I learned to "cooperate" with the environment instead of opposing it. The wind was no longer an enemy but a partner that needed to be avoided by using a cap and body; the distant traffic was not an interference but a timestamp that needed to be recorded in the modern soundscapes.
I began to consciously preserve some of the noises present in the scene. I believe this is the essence of our project - to document all the information of this place. Often, the noises cannot be replicated and are unique. Therefore, my records might be unique and full of meaning. I recorded the running sound of the air conditioning unit in the corridor, the chirping of birds in the sandy area under the trees, and the rushing sound of vehicles on the roadside. These sounds gave my work a distinctive and unique flavor.
I transformed from a "recording engineer" to a "sound hunter" and "archaeologist". Every time I started recording, it felt like a meticulous ritual. I began to sense the vibrations of the ground with my body, measure the humidity of the air with my skin, and try to encapsulate these multi-dimensional perceptions through the tiny diaphragm of the microphone, preserving them in the audio files.
In the later stages, I decided to avoid using fancy plugins and instead focus on achieving the ultimate authenticity. Noise reduction is not about eliminating all impurities, but about highlighting the main subject; equalization is not for beautification, but for eliminating the unpleasant resonant frequencies in the recording caused by the environment. The most valuable lesson I learned is: the best post-production is one that makes you not even notice its presence. It allows the natural acoustic characteristics of the space and the physical texture of the materials to flow out without any hindrance.
The biggest challenge I faced was how to handle the dynamic range of the sound. Footsteps are extremely transient sounds, with a huge volume difference between a crisp step and the subsequent space reverberation. Brutal compression would eliminate all the vitality and realism. Eventually, I decided not to sacrifice that decisive "first strike" and the natural decay tail - that is precisely where the soul of the sound lies.
This practice completely overturned my binary perception of "sound" and "noise". When I placed the typical "background noise" of footsteps under the auditory microscope, it revealed a vast universe. Noise, it turns out, is merely the unheard sounds. My role was that of a translator, converting the physical narrative of the collision between the material world and the body into a poem that human ears can understand and be moved by.