Wrapping Up MMS 172 🎧

However, nothing tested my patience quite like our production project, Ni-Lock Mo Ba Yung Pinto? These were the assignments where all the learning materials finally turned into a reality. My role for Group 3 was the voiceover and recording some of the Foley, since I wasn't the one doing the actual editing and mixing. When I listened to my unedited early takes of Maya's dialogue, I could hear my voice, but the dominant part of the audio in those first few takes was the noise. The hum of my electric fan, a tricycle passing by outside, the neighborhood dogs deciding to bark right when I was trying to build up the horror mood for a scene.

Capturing clean audio with my POCO F6 and my wireless lavalier mic required controlling my environment. I spent hours between 10:00 PM and 5:00 AM sweating inside my room with the fan turned off, doors and windows closed, just to get a decent recording. I also had to become a makeshift Foley artist in my own bedroom where I rubbed a blanket and pillowcase against my mic to simulate Maya moving in bed, shifted my computer chair so the squeak would sound like old bed springs, and used a cabinet door plus a shirt to fake the sound of climbing a bunk bed. It was exhausting, but it taught me that finding silence in a normal house was basically impossible, and that audio production turned out to be 50% technical skill and 50% extreme patience with where you record. The biggest thing I was grateful for was getting good groupmates who were really active, which made the production process run smoothly.

If I'm being honest about my time management, I could have done a lot better. I kept squeezing my recording into the tail end of my day, which is exactly why my cleanest takes happened around 3:00 AM. I forced myself into these exhausting all nighters, mostly because I hadn't planned my schedule earlier in the week.

By the time I wrote my midpoint reflection titled "The first time I got pissed off by neighbors’ dog barking outside", the exhaustion of production had fully set in. However, the forums provided a much-needed perspective, as seeing my classmates' submissions and their recording setups validated my struggles. Seeing everyone work on room acoustics, passing tricycles, and hardware limitations made it clear that we were all navigating the constraints to have usable audio.

Studying this course also made me notice the challenges of being an Open and Distance Learning (ODL) student. We coordinated an entire audio drama through group chats, and we had to merge raw audio files from different microphones in varied room tones. 

When our midpoint check-in as a group showed our audio sounded disconnected, we leaned hard into post-production instead. I trusted my groupmates to use Audacity to stitch our separate bedrooms into a cohesive and terrifying dorm room. It was a good lesson in remote group work, but I'll admit the online setup itself sometimes made communication hard. If I could suggest an improvement for this course, it would be at least one consultation per group via Google Meet or Zoom, so beginners could ask questions about mixing in real time instead of working everything out alone.

Looking at how my batch performed this term, I was genuinely impressed by everyone's resilience. Reading through the discussion forums and listening to the final projects, it was clear we all struggled in different ways. Some of my classmates excelled at the more technical side of mixing and mastering, such as EQs, compression, and spatial panning, the kind of stuff that takes real patience to get right.

Where did I think I stood among them? I would say my strength is more in creative production than in audio mixing and editing, as I knew how to source sound from whatever was around me and how to keep a team's vision together when things got messy.

So how did MMS 172 fit into my bigger picture as a BAMS student and future practitioner? Before this course, audio was basically an afterthought for me. My focus had always been on the visual side of multimedia. You could design the most beautiful visuals, but if the audio accompanying them was harsh or full of static, the experience was cheapened anyway. Bad audio broke immersion instantly, no matter how good the visuals looked.

Was I relieved to be done with this course? Honestly, yes. The late night sessions, the dogs that refused to cooperate, the stress of matching mismatched microphone tones, I was happy to set those down for a while. I didn't see myself becoming an audio enthusiast, since the technical side wasn't really where I felt most in control, and I would rather build web applications where I could undo a mistake instead of having to re-record it at 3 AM. 

But in the end, I understood a lot more about how sound was evaluated, cleaned up, and put together, and I could speak the same language as the audio people I'll work with. This trimester was exhausting, with overlapping deadlines competing for my attention at once. 

But MMS 172 taught me how to actually listen.