Since establishing my collaboration with film and TV production student Adam Roberts, I wanted to focus back on the virtual exhibition. Me and Katie arranged a zoom session to go through the exhibition again and for her to show me what she had done so far. Katie added a short section regarding the curation of the exhibition, and we both went through the artworks so that Katie could get a better understanding of the pieces, in order to detail a wall text. After adding more pieces and finishing the wall texts, we were both quite impressed with the outcome, and felt it looked quite cohesive and professional.
After constructing the exhibition, we were somewhat sceptical about whether we could insert a soundscape into the exhibition as a whole, as we could only see an option for applying a specific sound piece to an artwork. I get back in touch with the film and TV production student, and he sent me a sample piece of the soundscape. He mentioned to me that all the sounds were provided for free by the university, which eased my concern over copyright issues. Some of the sounds he created from using household objects to mimic certain sounds within a hospital landscape, such as the sound of a coffee machine or a camera clicking. I found the use of Foley, was quite innovative!
Screenshot of Soundscape Raw in Audacity
Another point was the style of the soundscape; the piece was curated in a narrative format, that illustrates a patients’ journey to get an MRI scan. I found using a narrative with sound created a very immersive and raw feeling, which will really engage the visitors.
When testing the soundscape within the exhibition, there became some issues with large file size. I began working on some strategies to compress the file, however the file remained to large. For this reason, I approached Adam (TV production student) again, to provide a raw copy of the file on audacity so that I could crop the soundscape to reduce the file size.
Upon receiving the audacity files, I came to find how confusing this software was to access. I initially attempted to clip some of the audio in order to compress the audio file, however I found that it removed key elements within the soundscape; such as the slow introduction, building up the tension.
I realised that instead of removing key pieces of audio, I could instead record the soundscape from another software and therefore minimise the storage capacity as it would only record sound.
Once recording the soundscape, I found the audio quality was lacking slightly, however I felt it was reasonable enough to be in the virtual exhibition. From this, I approached Katie and asked her to insert it within the exhibition. Once she did this, I went into the exhibition and conducted a test run. Overall, I was pleased with the outcome, despite the lacking in sound quality.
Once Katie had included information into the website to discuss her creative process, I felt that it came to a nice conclusion. I found the zoom sessions I had with Katie to be extremely beneficial in discussing our thoughts and showing what we were working on. By setting tasks and deadlines for each other, it ensured that we had a schedule to work towards and to ensure we finished efficiently.