A big part of what we do at Aeshen is creating instructional and informational content. We painstakingly work to create PowerPoint presentations, demonstration scripts for instructors, and supporting documentation. After creating these materials, we are often called upon to create a complete set of video and audio recordings based on the new content.
Creating the video recordings is a simple task. Very few things in the surrounding environment force me to re-record video footage of the demonstrations or PowerPoint presentations.
Audio is a completely different story. The human brain is very sophisticated. Not only can it perform calculations and orchestrate the overall functioning of your body, it works as an extremely fine tuned filter for extraneous stimuli. I did not realize this until I began recording audio tracks for the content that I developed.
It quickly became evident that a silent office or home space is not quiet at all. The extra sounds were simply filtered out and ignored by my brain. When I played back some of my first recordings, they were filled with sounds of breathing, air moving through the ventilation system, vehicles passing by, airplanes overhead, birds, dogs, and even far off construction noises.
I started out by hanging carpet and other materials around me to absorb the sounds. When that did not work, I moved from location to location hoping to find a quieter spot to record in. What I really found out is that each location in the building presented a different collection of background noises to filter out.
The other frustration was the variety of reverberation experienced in each location. One location was a simple room that offered little reverberation, but was subject to a great deal of background noise. Another room had a vaulted ceiling set at odd angles. Definitely not the right place to record quality audio.
After trying every room I could, I finally resigned myself to finding an alternative place to record. Unfortunately, recording studios charge from $65 to well over $100 per hour of use. That put them out when I realized that I would need many hours to record the audio.
Some heavy research helped me to decide that the best thing to do was to create my own studio. I am now sitting in a six by eight foot sound isolating room writing this blog. Building the studio was definitely not without its challenges. However, the tighter control I now have over the environment is enabling me to record much higher quality audio than I had before.
In the second installment of this blog, I will discuss the building of the studio along with some of the challenges I faced.
Posted Sunday, March 21st, 2010 at 9:21 pm by peterl
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