HOW

For the sound of the organ, originally, I assumed I would record my sister as she is a professional organist. However, I didn't know how to contact her and was unsure if she'd be happy to participate anyway. Then, on a spontaneous trip to Glasgow, I visited the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum where they happened to have daily Organ Recitals. However, I had no recording equipment other than my phone but made a voice note as a back up option. As my sister was looking less and less likely to be involved I started trying to work out creating an organ in ProTools with MIDI. Even after James went over it a second time and I tried to work it out with other students, it still seemed too complicated and laborious. At this point I contemplated contacting churches in the local area but from previous Christian themed projects I'm aware they tend to turn students away. Finally I turned to an ex Southampton and BIMM student as I thought he would have a wider range of contacts than anyone else I could reach out to. He couldn't think of an organist but knew a pianist who could play on an organ setting. So I made contact with Andrei Dutulescu and we discussed what I needed and what he was able to do. He said he'd never played organ before or even church music but we recorded a few takes with his equipment and below is our favourite. The clip we chose however was longer than the advised 30-60 second time frame so initially I used the first half of the clip and used the polyphonic elastic time feature to elongate the last note but I couldn't get it to sound smooth so found a natural break in the audio and used the latter half. This worked a lot better.

For the speaking portion of the piece I had planned to just use the original content which I obtained directly from KT King but realised I should probably record it myself. Although, after this revelation I realised it would also need to fit to the organ so it would be easier to get multiple people to just read the passage and then choose whichever tone of voice suited best.

When it came to the toilets my first attempt at recording with the zoom was all kinds of shit. I had completely forgotten how to use the equipment and didn't adjust the levels so I just had two 5+ minute recordings of silence which I didn't think to listen back to until very late in the project. I obviously had to redo this in a hurry and of course the more I frantically flushed the toilet the less it wanted to flush. So this part of the piece is definitely the weakest and could have been easily rectified had I planned a bit better. I organised the track by using the razor tool (click, B) and cutting it into sections so the narrative made sense. The final order went: door lock, light on, pouring water, toilet flush, tap on, unlock door, open door, light off. The pouring water didn't sound very realistic and also wasn't long enough so I found the website freesound where they had downloadable Wav files and I managed to find an appropriate one.

  

In retrospect I could have made way more out of the toilet sounds and made them more threatening sounding. (see Toilets With Threatening Auras) But overall I think the piece is successful as the contrast of sounds creates the connotations that I had hoped for.