Audio Hardware/Software Resonses

1. When I first learned we were going to make our own microphones, I thought it would be really hard. My TA gave us great instructions and helped us out as much as possible so it really wasn't that difficult. Cutting the wires and spinning them together and then soldering all of it together was pretty easy. I thought the hardest part was getting the materials for the project (the store was out of some of the materials) and then just waiting your turn. The mics worked pretty well during the sound walks. There were very low sounds and very high sounds that I am glad my microphones got. When listening to my recordings, I could hear everything that I wanted my microphones to pick up.

2. The MiiDsc worked well for me. It stores a lot of material so I was never worried about running out of space during a sound recording. The recorder we used for our sound walk was a little more advanced than the other recorders I have used in the past. I thought the equipment was easy to use and that it did what it was supposed to do. I would actually prefer to use the recorders I have used in the past because I thought setting the recorder up was confusing (the one we used during our sound walk). This might just be because the equipment was new to me. If I could design my own recorder, it would be a one-touch set up with a visual read-out of the sounds being recorded.

3. For this project, I used Audacity and LAME to edit my sounds. I used this system in the past when I was in high school when I helped one of my teachers who had to edit a lot of the school basketball games. We used Apple equipment so the software I used was iMovie and Final Cut in addition to Audacity. I chose Audacity not only because I had used it before but because it was pretty self-explanatory. I did have difficulty downloading and unzipping the LAME component but I'm not sure if that was because of my computer set-up or not having an unzip program. With Audacity, however, if you just experiment with the software, you should have been able to transfer and then edit the sounds pretty easily. I'm sure I'll be using this program again in school applications as well as some projects I'll be doing on my own.