Interview Recording Workshop

In this assignment I worked with Sabrina Yaacub and Isabella Francis. The objective was to record an interview consisting of four questions in three different locations; Classroom, Radio Studio and Outside using the best available external microphones. Sabrina composed the questions and each of us was interviewed and interviewed one another. This gave us all a feel of being on both sides. 

Classroom recording.
I interviewed Bella in the class room. We used the handheld audio recorder. This device didn't have a microphone attached to it. As it was inside a closed and isolated environment. However the only difficulty we faced was getting isabella to answer the question accordingly and I didn't handle her answers appropriately but the conflict made the interview more interesting so we kept the footage. The quality of the recording was good, both voices were audible. There were no mistakes and if we began to laugh I would simply press pause on the recorder so we can get it out of our system and continue recording. I was pleased with the end result. Using the hand held recorder is not hard or complicated. 

Radio Studio Recording
For the radio studio recording Bella was the interviewer and Sabrina the interviewee. The software that we used to record the interview is called reaper. In my personal opinion i find reaper easy to use, it allows room for both recording and editing at the same time. It was the first recording that we did, so there were a few errors but we would simply delete the recordings and start over in order to get them recorded in one take. However, another method we used was stop and start. If a pronunciation error was made, Bella or Sabrina would pause and then repeat their statement to make for simple editing. Before saving the recording we played the footage back to ourselves. The voices were audible as they both spoke into the microphone which I would move so they didn't have to. 

Outside
Sabrina interviewed me, this was the final interview we conducted in the lesson. It took place outside college between the main building and the gym. I choose this location because it was easily accessible and it would provide us with good outside audio of wind. For this we had to attach a microphone to the hand held recorder that we had. Sabrina held the microphone and I the recorder. It was very simple and it was done in one take. When played back the main inconvenience was the wind it was very heavy and the microphone picked up the audio very clearly, however the voices were heard quite clearly as we spoke close to the microphone because we predicted the weather.

Microphone Analysis
The two main types of microphones that we used include the following:
The Dynamic Microphone
These are loud and they capture sounds without distortions. Which made it suitable to use outside, to capture the sound of our voices outdoors. 
The Condenser Microphone
These are commonly used for studio recording, especially on vocals. They are good at picking up more tonal variation and nuance than the dynamic microphone. This makes in suitable for a close and restricted environment that cannot be affected greatly by outdoor sound.