Reframing the Interface - Editing sound | Charlotte Whitworth

Unfortunately when going over to record my mum, I wasn’t too prepared for the recording and everything seemed to keep going wrong. I had planned to record using a microphone that I had bought beforehand, which I had tested and managed to get working well at the time. However, when it came to finally recording in Spain, the microphone decided it didn’t want to work with the macbook so I had to use the only other microphone I had, which happened to be connected to the computer. The microphone of a macbook pro is of questioning quality, however, it was not too bad and was still saveable in a way.

I took the audio I had into audition, and used all my knowledge and research in order to attempt to fix it. The main aspect of it that were wrong consisted of the high esses you could hear in my mums speech, as well as the slight echo in her voice. So I took care of the esses first and used an extra called the DeEsser, which helps you pin point where the peaking sound is and dulls it out, making the audio less peaked.

Another thing I did to change the audio was that I made sure there was no unwanted noise in the background, to do this I took a sample from the silence I recorded and then put it through the reduction process. This meant that the program would look throughout the audio, and if there were similar patterns or notes then they would be either muted, dulled, or deleted.

To get rid of the echo sound along with the voice, I ran the audio through a reverb process. This meant I could change the reverb of the voice, so I attempted to make it as dry as possibly in order to make the voice sound like a decent recording. I also used an equaliser at this point to see if I could move anything around and see what I got, it worked a couple of times however I could always still hear the echo when the volume was turned up.

Although the end audio might not be the best, I believe it was the best of what I could personally get from the original audio. I have learnt from this experience, however that can be found within my evaluation.