Sound Ethics, Sound Recording, Sound Studio

Texts to have read / listened to: Writer/Designer on “Working with Multimodal Assets and Sources” (Ball, Sheppard, Arola); Stuart Fowkes on field recording; Alison MacAdam on breathing life into audio scenes; and optionally some overviews of CC licenses and Fair Use.

Work to have achieved: a proposal for the audio narrative, posted to the issue queue

Plan for the day

Key Concepts and Practical Takeaways (10-20 min)
Questions and Answers (10-15 min)
Homework preview
Studio time

1. Key Concepts and Practical Takeaways (10-20 min)

In breakout rooms, work through the following questions about the reading/listening for today. Some you should be able to go through rather quickly; others may require more discussion.

Also, just a heads up: several of the True/False questions are more complicated than that binary implies!

Please take notes in our shared note doc to make up for my inability to hear all the rooms at once. I'll float around as best I can, but I do love finding overlaps and tensions across groups, when possible!

Call me in () if you can’t come to a resolution!

Using Sources

True or false: if you can find it on the internet, you can use it in your project.
True or false: the only sources you can use in this project are those you record yourself.
True or false: if you record your own sources, you don’t have to cite them.
True or false: if you use a source with a Creative Commons license, you don’t have to cite it.
What’s the difference between fair use and Creative Commons?
How would you define a “credible citation” in relation to the audio narratives you’ve proposed?
Why do you think Ball, Sheppard, and Arola are so insistent about folder structure and file naming conventions?
EXT: Does my assignment of the Writer/Designer chapter fulfill the criteria of fair use? Consider all four major factors.
EXT: For each entry in your project’s assets list, add Rights information as per the “Touchpoint” on Writer/Designer page 160. (You’ll need to keep updating this, of course, as you determine what assets you really want to use.)

Recording Audio

What’s one way to make sure you’re recording the sound you want to (and not, say, the loud bus passing by your conversation)?
What do Fowkes and MacAdam consider tempting cliches of soundwriting, and how do they suggest getting past them?
Would you (each of you, specifically, for this project) want to work from a written script? Why or why not?
Would you (again, each of you in the breakout room) want to incorporate human voices in your audio narratives? How or how much, and why (or why not)?
EXT: Read through the link at the top of Fowkes’ piece: Top 10 Simple Field Recording Tips. Any surprises that others in the class should know about?

2. Q & A (10-15 min)

Let’s talk through any questions or tensions that came up. I especially want to make sure we’re all on the same page about those fuzzier “True/False” questions.

And here are some great questions that came up in Perusall that I want to be sure to answer publicly:

What exactly does "credibility" mean in the context of our soundscape projects, which are more narrative than scholarly?

It's less a matter of accuracy, in this case, than of appropriateness and ethos more broadly: Does your use of the asset take genre expectations into account? Have you cited where it came from and your license for using it (which could be that it's a fair use, or that you created it), so listeners know you're being ethical in your sourcing? Relatedly, if you're using CC-licensed material that includes an attribution (BY) clause, have you named your source in the audio narrative itself? If you're using something with a sharealike (SA) clause, have you applied the same license to your own work? Have any identifiable voices given their consent to being recorded, and have you documented that consent somewhere? All of those actions help determine whether you seem trustworthy in your use of source material.

Do we need to request permission from a copyright owner for sounds, such as crowd noises, we may find on the internet for our project?

It depends on how you're using it, and what permissions the creator may already have granted. There's a lot of multimodal source material that's released either into the public domain (in which case you don't even need to cite it... though I suggest you do, for ethos reasons) or released with explicit permission to copy (e.g. with a Creative Commons license). In those cases, you don't need to ask for permission because you already have it.

You may also be able to make the case that your use of the source material counts as a Fair Use. Consider the Four Factors (Ball et al 156): the purpose of your use, the nature of the copyrighted work, the amount of the work used, and the market effect. If the preponderance of those factors point to your use being fair, you can probably get away without consulting the original writer/designers.

Where copyright and explicit requests for permission come into play is when your use does *not* qualify as Fair Use: for instance, if you're releasing something widely that just reuses the full chorus of a famous song and could ostensibly substitute for paid downloads of an original song, you're on the wrong end of nature (creative work), amount (heart of the work), and market effect.

It's legitimately complicated! Feel free to talk it out with me if you're not sure about the Fair Use analysis.

Do we have to obtain a CC license?

Not necessarily! You get to decide, based on whether you want others to be able to reuse and remix your work without asking you, or if you'd rather they got in touch so you could decide to offer or withhold permission. Remember that if you do nothing, your work is automatically under your own copyright!

And even if you do want to be permissive by default, you'd usually still have the freedom to decide what level of permission to give: e.g. whether it could be used for commercial purposes or not, if your work had to be left intact to be used or if it could be modified, etc. There's a free tool at creativecommons.org/choose/ to help you weigh those licenses... and there are other open licenses, besides CC.

The one exception, when you don't get a say in what license to use (or whether to provide any license), is if you're using material that has a ShareAlike clause: that is, if one of your assets is CC-BY-SA or CC-BY-NC-SA. In that case, you must use the same license as your source. Note that this means you cannot simultaneously use sources with incompatible ShareAlike licenses.

Who exactly are asset lists for?

This came in late enough that I don't have a full write-up. What do you all think?

How does GitHub stack up to actual cloud storage services? Should we have any mindfulness about how many commits of larger (non-text) files we make?

This came in late enough that I don't have a full write-up, but two short answers: (1) this is why we need git-lfs, which I've already set up on the soundscape repository; (2) this is one reason to keep your full sources in a folder that you .gitignore

Has anyone tried out any of the sites linked to from our plentiful Resources page? Any recommendations, warnings, or other advice for your classmates?

Note that there are sections for both free/licensed sounds and music, and also (separately) for audio-unit-specific advice and examples.

3. Homework preview (5 min)

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4. General advice based on proposals

Lots of great ideas in those proposals. My small bits of broadly applicable advice:

This is My Life

If you're doing a day-in-the-life or commute, the challenge is to make at least some of your sounds different from everyone else's: parts of a particular soundscape, not a generic one. Voiceover, even the little mutterings of a solitary person to themselves, may help; your choice of a soundtrack overlay might, as well.

Consider Getting it in Writing

One benefit to drafting a project in prose is that your script doubles as a transcript – which improves both accessibility and discoverability. It also means you get clean version history as you revise your script. (One downside is that it's sometimes easier to do or say than it is to write.) Still: something to keep in the back of your mind, especially if you're working on something fictional.

Roll Tape

On the flip side, if you're proposing something where you're not sure what you'll find, consider a journalistic approach: record more than you think you'll need; narrate what you're doing as you're doing it; then add a post-hoc voiceover that makes sense of (tells the story of) what you ultimately found.

5. Studio time! (40-45 min)

Do whatever work you need to get something toward your project posted to your GitHub repository by Thursday: find audio sources you have permission to use, extract assets from them, record test voiceover with your phone or computer, start moving things around in Audacity, practice some more with GitHub Desktop (or command line git).

Warning: don't use the GitHub website for Audacity files! They quickly get too large for the site to handle. Instead, commit locally, then push, from GH Desktop (or the command line). I've set up the repo to use Git-LFS (Large File Storage), which should bypass that concern... but the website interface doesn't know how to do that.

The goal for now is to get a feel for how you work with audio, not to have a finished product. On Thursday, we’ll use your experience to refine our shared baseline criteria and brainstorm some aspirational goals.

To help with goal-setting and reflection (and, again, so I can figure out where I can be most helpful), please write a brief note in the shared doc about what you're planning to work on today; at the end of class, reply to your own note to say what you achieved and/or to set yourself a new goal for homework.

Call me in if you need help with Audacity, Git/GitHub, or determining the license on an audio source!

Homework for next time:

Barring unforeseen circumstances, we're back in person on Thursday! I'll see you in CL 435 at the usual time.

Please wear a high-quality mask that fits securely over your nose and mouth: the omicron variant can spread even among vaccinated people, though the booster shots are highly effective at limiting the severity of the disease. If the only masks you have are simple cloth, I hear that N95 or equivalent respirators will be available at the concierge entrances to University buildings for those who want them. You can also double-mask with cloth to improve both the fit and the filtration.

If you're sick or otherwise unable to come in, please let me know! I'm happy to keep the Zoom open as a backup. But our primary mode of engagement will be in person.

Look over the audio resources on the site, and dig into anything that seems like it would help you.
- Free and licensed sounds
- Advice and examples
Work on your audio narratives, getting at least two sound assets in Audacity in conversation with each other. If you have time, do more!
Push a preview of your project to your GitHub repository. As per the assignment prompt, this should include:
- A layered Audacity project file (.aup3), showing the arrangement of your sounds so far (need not be a complete soundscape or narrative yet).
- At least one static screenshot (.png or .jpg) of your Audacity file in progress. (You'll use this in your final reflection, for comparison later to subsequent drafts). Note that link: you shouldn't need your camera for this.
- A plain text (.txt) or markdown (.md) file, explaining in at least 300 words what you're showing us in this preview. Feel free also to ask questions or lay out next steps for yourself!
- An **updated list of assets** (either directly in README.md or in a separate assets.md / credits.md file), indicating which the files you've actually recorded or otherwise obtained. Add source documentation for any outside sources – along with your permission to use them (e.g. licenses, fair use; see Writer/Designer p. 160-165). Remember: thanks to version control, you don't need to rename this file. : )
- Finally, export a playable mp3 file, both as a snapshot and just in case something goes awry with your Audacity project file.

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