The surges of silence, hmmmmm

For the past five years my community has staged an annual Relay for Life in our new stadium, 24 hours filled with team participants and individuals walking round and round the football field to raise funds for the American Cancer Society. For the past few years, my wife has served as a team captain, so I knew I’d be involved one way or another.

Why not bring the audio equipment and practice gathering good, clean audio – perhaps even enough to produce my first audio story? During the multimedia seminar, those of us just starting to learn these new skills were advised to start with audio. First learn the techniques of gathering good audio, then learn how to build a good audio story. Learn audio before trying to produce an audio-driven slide show.

The stadium setting with music blaring over its public address system proved to be a challenging environment for interviews. I was equipped with a decent set of headphones now, so I could detect audio problems. I found that the simple use of a lapel mic worked well to subordinate the blare of music, rendering crisp audio of the person being interviewed. I could hear that much over my headphones. What I could also hear, however, was the background music raging back at full volume each time the speaker paused, creating a seesaw effect with the recording levels.

By the third interview I realized the surging music was probably not a problem that could be edited away. The audio surge needed to be fixed in the field, but how?

Back home in bed for the evening (the overnight relay being my wife’s project, after all, not mine), I settled into re-reading the manual for the Olympus WS-300 series digital recorder and found there is no way to set a recording level manually. The little recorder does this automatically. All you can do is switch the microphone sensitivity between Conference and Dictation. I had the recorder set on Conference, making the microphone as sensitive as possible. With no up-front speaking voice to level during pauses, the little recorder was apparently switching over to the music in the background and re-leveling. Would the lapel mic set at the less sensitive Dictation solve the music surge problem?

Back at the stadium the next morning, I planned to test my theory: find someone to record twice, once at the Conference setting and again at the Dictation setting, to learn whether this resolved the surge.

Interviewee and headphones in place, I pressed Record.

Even before asking the first question, I noticed a steady, low buzz. Something was creating a hum, and I knew from experience that the hum would trump anything else I tried to record. The hum hadn’t been there the day before, and several attempts to relocate the interview within the stadium revealed there was going to be no escape. [I figured out much later after combing forums and tutorials on the Internet that the hum was most likely due to a poor connection with the 1/8” jack on the external microphone. Apparently these small jacks are notorious for imprecise connections that can produce an auditory hum.]

I put away my recording gear reluctantly – defeated again – and helped my wife pack up her sleeping bag and tent for the return home, all the while telling her about the problems I was having with recording.

The weekend left me wondering whether this was how my summer would go, tripping over one technical snag after another?

My wife, however, seemed oddly unsympathetic.