Mr Keil microphone proximity recording

part 2: the background conversation

The task here was to get a recording of background conversations as you heat in such public places, it had to be distorted enough so you cant understand the speech yet you can still hear a conversation taking place.

The first time we tried to do this recording we encountered a lot of problems first of all people were too shy and did not want to get recorded and because they did not know what to talk about there was a lot of gaps in the conversation. we also made a big mistake whilst recording, we recorded too close to the people and there speech could be heard clearly which was not what the task asked us to do. as well as this we learned that muffleing the mic would get the sound that we wanted. below are some videos.

here you can see exactly how we recorded the sound, as you can see it was too close to the conversation  (proximity was poor) and also the camera shutter could be heard in the recording. The battery died out half way the recording so we only got a little bit of the conversation.

after hearing the recording we decided the recording was not great so we went to record again and this time used the surrunding and proximty to the best with the enviorment we had, below are some pictures which shows how we did this.

This is me with the sound recorder. As you can see i am recording from a meter and a half off the ground so i can capture the best sounds. As well as this i also used my jacket to muffle the sound, we learnt from a previous attemp that recording with out muffling the sound made the sound very clear and you could hear the full conversation which didn't work for us. Using this method we could control the amount of sound being heard and distortion.                                                              

In this picture you can see the material of my sleeve, its a fabric which has a lot of free space in it, this means that its good for absorbing sound. 

Here is a picture of room '1' where the conversation was taking place, i marked the areas where the sound will be absorbed in red, as you can see they are tables, chairs and of course the carpet which makes the most difference. The purple areas are where the sound gets bounced off such areas are the glass, windows and walls.

Heres another shot of room '1' you can see the size of the room and also the size of the people having the conversation. As you can see it is quite a large room and there was also another room. Note that this is not the room where the sound was recorded from.

This is the room where the sound was recorded, from here you can see room '1' and the distance from the speech.

This is a picture showing room '2' and the exact location of the recorder in the blue circled and the green arrow shows the direction which the sound is moving.

Here is the sound clip as you can see the conversation is fairly constant in sound until it reaches the yellow region where it becomes more loud.

Here is the end sound enjoy: