Week Two
We began last weeks lesson by setting up the mixer and speakers and whilst doing this we learnt that everything needs power and also about the safety aspect of setting up. For example, not letting the cables hang loose around the speakers and organising the cables so that they are out of the way of the audience (this prevents the speakers being knocked over or the audience falling). Next we sat down and learnt about the mixer itself and I tried to do a quick sketch of the layout of the faders and inputs (apologies!)
After this we listened to some sounds collected my members of the class and from this I learnt:
- If there is any silence in a sound that you don’t know very well it causes problems when diffusing and one way to deal with this is to drop all the faders and gradually bring them back in. But a knowledge of the sounds your diffusing is essential.
- Watch the speakers so that you don’t have the faders up too loud and damage them.
- Effects such as delay can have a huge impact on the movement of the sound and different techniques can be used on the faders to swing the sound around the speakers and send the sound from front to back.
After listening to these we summarised what we’d covered in the lesson and discussed how different set-ups of the speakers can have different advantages when it comes to diffusing. We also talked about the whole process of choosing sounds and how this impacts on the composition and the end performance.
After it was mentioned in last weeks class I went away and tried to research ’spectromorphology’ and was utterly confused after the first paragraph but it did inspire me to listen to some tracks from Denis Smalley’s album ‘Impact interieurs’ and this time I tried to imagine how it would/could sound with diffusion. With the idea of diffusion in mind I also had ago at recording some new sounds and altering the ones I’d captured last week.
