MMS 172 Closing Blog:
Sounds of a new beginning

The waveforms being a key visual representation of audio mirrors my experiences in this class: there’s peaks and dips, ups and downs. As it’s about to end, this retrospective writing made me realize how long the journey has been, but more importantly, that it’s not over.

MMS 172 certainly was a class that I didn’t want to just “get over with,” I genuinely wanted to learn as much as I could. Whether I put in the best effort in accomplishing that was questionable, but I can definitely say that I learned a ton. Fortunately, there’s so many changes I’m making to my practice because of it - there’s truly so many things that go into producing good quality audio. I used to think about it very one-dimensionally, but there are actually so many points of consideration aside from equipment: delivery, acoustics, setup, and more. These were things I had not considered beforehand. Thankfully, the course material approached production in a very streamlined way, each consideration outlined in digestible intervals.

My feelings on the assignments were twofold. On one hand, these parts of the course, especially Assignment 3, was where I learned the most. Synthesizing the learnings from the course materials through a hands-on approach helped give some more clarity on the parts I wasn’t confident on yet. However, there were only a few of them, culminating in the final audio project. I guess from a grading standpoint, there is little room to mess up and the implicit feeling that I should give my best efforts on all of them. I also think I was probably surprised at the difference following MMS 173, another class that Prof. also handled, which had more requirements. But I do think the matter with audio was that its production is more involved, especially for a lot of us with constraints on external sounds, combined with the fact that there’s a lot of topics to cover - so I understand why it had to be that way.

That being said, I am decently satisfied with the outputs I have put out. Though I had limitations on what I could come up with, I like the project I conceptualized. The process wasn’t smooth, and I had to pivot multiple times, but it was definitely rewarding, involved as it was. One of my favorite moments in this whole process was trying to do all the vocal processing and mixing in one night, then getting ear-blind at 2 AM not knowing what sounds good or bad anymore. That’s when I realized how necessary it is to take your time and edit over a longer interval if possible. It’s like a fresh set of ears every time I listen to it again. I’m now more well-versed on my chosen DAW (Fairlight, Davinci Resolve) after as well – which was one of my ultimate goals when conceptualizing the project. The process of light music production work through MIDI sequences was also new ground for me – and it was fun exploring virtual instruments, and really put into perspective how involved music composition and production really is. Moving forward, I’m not sure if I’ll pursue more endeavors on the musical side of audio, but this was a fun experience nonetheless. Was my final output perfect, or excellent? Not really. But using my past work as a baseline, I’m certainly happy with it. 

About the elephant in the room… I was definitely once again nowhere to be found on the discussion boards, despite me saying the same thing last term in MMS 173. I was reading Prof’s prompts and posts on the different topics there, I guess I was just too intimidated to say anything, especially since it wasn’t required. I wasn’t fully disconnected from everyone during this term, though. Halfway through the class, someone reached out to me for help on his project’s content, and I sent in a testimonial for my mic. I recently checked out his output and was thoroughly impressed; I’m glad to have contributed to it. I also quickly skimmed through my other classmates’ final outputs after submitting mine: and while there was a variety in the project types, it was nice seeing everyone put so much attention to detail and time into the whole process. I think I sit somewhere in the middle – I’ve heard some really clean recordings, and also, in comparison to Prof.’s voice recordings on the course site, I still have room for improvement.

As for where I stand with audio after this class, I definitely acquired a newfound appreciation for it. I’ve mentioned in my midpoint that I tend to undervalue that modality whenever I have multimedia projects, and in my project walkthrough, that I’ve always had audio issues whenever I make voiceovers. It was like this cycle where I become unenthusiastic whenever I have to deal with voiceovers in a project because I knew it would end up being subpar. Then I also didn’t know how to approach being better at producing something better as there are so many parts to it. I also remember a time where, for a project, I resorted to using a Lo-Fi radio to mask my audio quality. I don’t remember how well it worked, but I cringe now thinking about it. There’s really no way around improving it but to take the time, set expectations, and learn the basics little by little.

To put it into perspective, let me paint you a picture of how I used to produce voiceover audios.  For starters, I never knew where to record, not knowing about reflections. I used to station my mic inside a cabinet as I thought it made for a recording booth. The thing was there was nothing inside that could possibly absorb and reduce some of the reflections. I may as well have recorded anywhere else in my own room. My voiceovers in the past too were full of audible mouth clicks and saliva sounds that were a pain to edit out… Now I know it’s because I was standing way too close to my microphone. It’s things like these that I’ve realized now, and going off my final project output, I can already hear a difference. There was no way that the concepts in this class were going in one ear and out the other. I’m keeping these with me, and I can’t wait to see my future multimedia outputs, especially videos, with my newfound learnings.

Though this marks my last engagement with the class, I’ll continue trying to improve my audio. At least, now, I’ve started, I know how to navigate my room for improvement, and I can approach it methodically. It’s certainly a leap when compared to my previous approach of… not doing anything at all.