For our location recordings we used the ZOOM H2 recording devices, these were very effective as they have a good radius for recording and produce high quality sound capturing.
We went to various different locations but unfortunately during rendering some of our recordings were lost, we were left with two recordings to upload and analyse.
The first location we recorded at was a grass patch on the Deanfield site, a man was using a leaf blower, we used this for our loudest area recording.
The main sound captured was the leaf blower, with a loud noise and prominent clarity. However in the background you could faintly make out the noise of wind with an average/equal frequency, and at the start of the first recording there is a very brief moment of a person talking, this stands out quite noticeably at the beginning as it is very clear to the microphone's recording.
The second location we recorded was next to a fairly busy road at the Deanfield site, the most noticeable sounds are the people having a conversation within the recording and the passing by cars. The talking isn't very clear to the recording compared to the passing by cars, this is because they were to the left of the microphone, the microphone was pointed towards the road. As the cars pass by they have a fairly low frequency, and in the background of this recording you can hear faint sounds of things being loaded into vehicles, bags rustling, birds, wind blowing trees and people walking, these all noticeably had low frequencies except for the birds which had very little clarity but a reasonably high frequency.
Throughout both recordings there was additional, unexpected sounds. The most noticeable of these would be the very far away sounds that were picked up such as footsteps, and the feedback from simply moving the ZOOM H2 recorder slightly.
Background noise that was most obtrusive to any dialogue in our recordings would be the wind levels and passing by cars, these tended to drown out most of the dialogue in the recordings for a brief moment of time or quieten the volume of the dialogue, the dynamics of the dialogue.
We noticed that as something is further away from the ZOOM H2 recording device, it will usually have a lower frequency and not be as clear to the recording as audible things that are closer to the device. For example, a car driving in the distance would be faintly heard on the recording in comparison to people speaking next to the device. We were also given headphones to use for our recordings to be able to monitor sound closely without interference, to be able to focus on what we were picking up on the recording devices, these were greatly efficient as it allowed us to judge where the best locations for recording different levels of sound would be, such as by a road, in a library or near the town centre.
One of our lost recordings during rendering was our quietest location recording, the library. We stood in the library briefly for around a minute and recorded what was happening in our surroundings. From memory, we heard typing on the computers which was the most noticeable thing in the recording with absolute clarity and a low frequency, then secondly the footsteps as people walked about the library, which had good clarity especially as they walked in front of the recording device, and they also had a low frequency.
Another lost location recording was in the a hallway outside a classroom, this was our 'middle sound level' recording. The device picked up the occasional sound from the classroom such as a lecturer speaking to the class or a student talking and people walking in the hallway which got from quiet, to loud and quiet again as they walked past the recording device. The sounds in this recording tended to be faint with the occasional loud sound (passers by), with a slight echo in the narrow hallway as sound was created. Most of the sounds in this recording had a low-mid frequency.
A thing we noticed with sounds recorded indoor and outdoor was that with indoor recordings, more is picked up on the device as there is less space for sound to travel, it can bounce off walls and remain in a certain area, making it more audible to the device. Whereas sound outdoor isn't picked up so accurately, sound can go off in every direction and some of it is likely to be lost. With sound recordings outdoor you have the threat of wind more than you do indoor, this is easily taken care of with a wind-shield that is placed around the microphone, however it is still a problem that is more obstructive than indoor sound. Indoor sounds tend to be more audible, clearer to the device as there isn't as much space for the sound to travel.
An improvement to the ZOOM H2 recording device I would make for a more professional set-up would be to add a feature that can raise or lower the levels of background noise to make for more focused audio, for example if I wanted to focus on the conversation of people next to a road, wanted to keep the sound of cars in the background but decided they were too loud, I'd use this feature to lower the dynamics of the background noise (the cars).
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