For this week we had a guest lecture from Jez Riley French who is a field recordist and sound artist, Jez spoke to us about field recording and some of the projects and work he’s done and the use of using different methods for recording live sound, such as placing contact mics in unusual places. This sparked a few idea’s of my own of how I could better record sound on location instead of using the standard conventional methods. He also showed us some of his own mics which he had adapted himself so that he could pick up low and mid frequencies better.

 

Jez spoke about how he had designed some the iconic sounds for well known movies such as the star wars trilogy where he placed contact mics on a radio tower. He also showed us some other examples of his work where he placed hydrophones into the water on the ice to pick up the air bubbles being released from melting ice.

 

Jez mainly focuses his work within sound design and sound art, and a lot of his work has a very artistic quality to it, he also spoke about idea’s related to his work and gave us a few tips on how we can adapt our own recordings and to be prepared to adapt to different environments and such.

 

He showed us more of his recording equipment and gave some more advice on how we should approach field recording. He also stated that trial and error is a good method when trying to figure out what sound it is that we’re trying to achieve when designing our own sounds.

 

Through this lecture I picked up a few idea’s about sound recording which I could adapt to my own work and my soundscape, on how to get clearer sounding recordings, the advice on different mic placement I found most helpful and is something that I want to experiment with.