(this is a duplicate of a post on my art practice blog, but it deals with PMC topics so i put it here too. i recommend looking at my AP4 blog for context)

i carried out some very basic tests on stereo speakers this morning in the ECA, just to get a sense of space and volume. i rented out some genelec speakers from the allison house music store and i thought they worked very well – visually the right size and with a strong presence even in a large echoey room. they are just placed on plinths as i didn’t have the strength or correct amount of arms to carry any more equipment, but there are some good looking stands in the music store too which i will certainly try out in the future. i tested out 3 elements of the work to varying degrees of success:

this is a little video of the monologue recording. the quality and performance of the monologue and recording i am happy with, although i am sure i will rerecord it in the future just to get more varieties in tones, but the volume levels need to be edited and i think it would be much more successful if the opposing variations are more in sync. it is still to easy to get lost in both recordings at once, meaning the actual words become hard to follow, but this is not so much of a problem when the voices line up. will edit heavily + report back !

this is the voice/vocaloid duet, and i thought i worked so well – much much better in the space as you can hopefully see from the video. being able to move between the speakers makes all the difference, and they almost merge in and out of one another when you are equidistant from both. this was more of an experiment so i am glad it turned out well but i will have to think carefully about where this effect would work in the overall sequence of events. another notable point was that when the vocaloid stopped singing the lyrics, just singing ‘la’s, the overall sound did feel more like a duet, yet the artifice of the vocaloid was made immediately clear. this worked well for the chorus of the song, especially resonant with having ‘no more words to sing’.

this last video was just to test out some unedited crowd noises in a space. it was effective in filling the space with atmospheric noise, but didn’t go too well when matched with other audio – definitely works best on its own. again i am not quite sure where it fits in the grand scheme of things but certainly worth pursuing.

apologies for the vertical videos throughout.