Kiran

This week, members of our team spent Friday morning Kayaking out in Monterey Bay to record sea others, seals and other marine sounds. We were able to record with Nick Virzi’s Aquarian H2A hydrophone, and our sounds included birds, kelp, waves, otters and seals. By the time we were out on the kayak’s, it was harder to find seals, so we hope to go back again. In the grand scope of the project though, we have lots of seals from Antarctica and Año Nuevo already which is great. We are still wanting to plan for whale recordings per usual. The ambisonic mic was great for birds, and we were able to get a lot of ocean splashing on rock sounds with the directional field mic. Though George could not make it, founder of snow sports outdoor brand Coalition Snow Jen Gurecki was able to join us. She happened to be an expert white water rafting leader and was the perfect fourth member of the excursion that morning.

We will focus on heading out to Monterey again, reaching out to relevant contributors and recording more animal sounds this week (birds and walruses) before shifting focus to the editing process.

Hawi

This week we went to Monterey for the unique chance to field record. Initially I was hesitant to kayak, but we happened to run into Jen who was a professional white water rafter. I had an amazing time documenting the different marine sounds. A highlight of mine was recording this beautiful trickling noise from the rocks.

Leslie

To get to Monterey, Hawi and I were up at 5am so that we could get to Monterey before it got crowded (harder to record then). It was very refreshing to be able to listen to the world without extra distractions from man-made sounds. We left campus at the break of dawn and watched the sunrise as we drove south to Monterey.

Kiran’s friend Jenn, a professional kayaker, was able to assist us in recording and kayaking. We started kayaking at around 9am, and we immediately witnessed a pod of sea otters on the kelp bed near the beach. We were able to document them by recording and taking pictures. We then kayaked around the shoreline and recorded bird calls. We also tried to use the hydrophone, and we heard a lot of crackling sounds from the microphone. The ocean was calmer/quieter than we had expected it to be. We left Monterey at around noon.

This experience was wonderful, both in recording audio and team bonding. Being in tandem kayaks meant that we had to trust each other and work cohesively as a team, and I think that we all learned an immense amount from this experience.

George

Going into last week, my primary goal was to become better acquainted with the tools I will be using for the sound design portion of the project. I am primarily a Logic Pro user, so I started off there, manipulating sounds using the functions and plugins that I am most familiar with. I created a small set of sample sounds (primarily drum one-shots) using three core techniques: (1) excerptig natural transients (e.g., water drop, stick hitting sand, etc.), (2) using a fade tool as an ADSR to turn a sustained sound (e.g., ocean sound, beach breeze) into a transient, and (3) microsampling—taking a single (or a couple) oscillations from a recording, looping that slice to create a sustained pitch, and shaping it with the fade tool or transient shaping plugin. After that, I would apply other effects (EQ, distortion, reverb, delay, pitch correction, phaser, etc.).

One of the challenges I ran into was bringing sounds up to a commercially viable loudness without over-distorting (or excessively peaking). So far, it has been manageable, but I will continue to experiment with saturation and other tools to get drum sounds to knock. Kiran early on recommended using the microsampling function in Ableton, so I also spent time getting adjusted to that workstation to give myself access to new creative tools and to have as a common language. I still have work to do in improving my fluency in the program, but I now feel comfortable with the microsampling function and have taken note of a few key native tools that are less accessible in Logic Pro (e.g., easily adjusting pitch envelope of a sample).

This coming week I will continue with this experimentation, but with the goal of producing a small selection of sounds that I could imagine myself using and properly labeling/organizing/documenting them in accordance with expectations from companies like Splice (i.e., labeled with sound description [kick, snare, etc.], indication of sound origin [driftwood, waves, bird], bpm, and key [when applicable]). I will also try to collect a small library of useful reference sources (namely, YouTube videos that help[ed] me learn the process).