Week 3 Episode 4: Exercises

Parallel Worlds

Full transcript and exercises available at the course website, parallel.olliepalmer.com Exercises: - Self-reflection (5 minutes) - This exercise requires a computer, or a multitrack audio editing programme on a smartphone or tablet: - Part one: Over the past few weeks you’ve been recording sounds from everyday life. Your task today is to find one or more of those sounds – ideally something more than a few seconds long – and listen to it very carefully. What are the identifiable parts of the sound? Try to draw a diagram of the sound, and think how you might be able to recreate that sound without using the original objects. For example, with the simple-seeming sound of filling and boiling a kettle, I have the noise of opening the lid, filling the kettle with water, closing the lid, clunking the kettle onto its stand, flicking the switch, the low frequency boil starting, the bubbling and swooshing of water, the switch clicking off. There are low frequencies, high frequencies, bits that are one off, bits that repeat. It might help to draw a diagram of the sounds (see the way that Michel Gondry broke down the song ‘Star Guitar’ in the making of the music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GF0-wGbRqEs). - Part two: Try to recreate the sound using only your mouth, and multi-track audio recording. You might need to work on this in layers, for example, making the click noises on one soundtrack, and the burbling noises on another, and so on. Top tip: if you listen to the sound using headphones, and record using another device, you can accurately mimic the timings of the original. - Once you’re done, listen to both sounds. How good a job have you done?