Protools

PROTOOLS

This semester we had a lecture about sound editing with ProTools. I’ve already had some small baby steps into sound editing thanks to my history in video editing (wedding videos and short cinematic films I’ve made before), but I’ve only ever really done the bare minimum. It was interesting to find out what kind of things we can actually do. I took some notes during the lecture to make sure that I could replicate the things we went through on my own time. I already knew that I wanted to add sound to my exhibition, so the knowledge came in handy.

Sounds from Finland

Since the whole idea of my collection is based in Finland, it only made sense for the sound to be from there too. I wanted to have a calm ambience of Finnish nature to be the first thing people hear as they stepped close enough to examine the art. As I have mentioned earlier, for me, the most Finnish thing is the specific sound of a bird that can be heard early during a summer morning by the lake. It’s something most Finnish people identify as the sound of summer (apart from hungry mosquitoes). This particular sound comes from a water bird called kuikka, or in English, a loon. The song of the loon is best heard just before sunrise when the lake water is still like a mirror. Below is a great example of this magical moment captured more than ten years ago.

I didn’t want to just take a ready-made video and call it a day, so instead I went to browse through Yle Arkisto’s sound archive. Yle is basically the Finnish BBC. Yle has stored multiple sound clips over the years to use in projects which are not commercial. Using these audio clips was crucial, as I needed the audio to be authentically Finnish. There was no point in finding random sounds off the internet if they weren’t of the right origin.

I found multiple tracks of audio I liked, in hopes to compile them into one mix. I of course needed the sound of the loon, some buzzing of insects and singing of other Finnish birds as well as the calm sound of lake waves. I downloaded these tracks and downloaded a trial version of ProTools to my laptop.

In ProTools, I used my notes from the lecture as well as some remaining memory to replicate the set-up we had on the editing suite and then imported the audio clips from Yle. Originally I wanted to just loop the sound so that it would play indefinitely but struggled to fade the ending with the start without a noticeable stop in the track. In the end, I decided to duplicate the tracks a few times, blend the meeting points as neatly as I could and fiddle with volume to make sure that no sound was overpowering the other.

I exported the final four-minute track and was done. I now had a pretty convincing audio file that sounded like I was standing by the lake, in the morning and listening to the loon’s song. For the actual Degree Show, I feel like I either need to make a longer version of the track so that one viewer won’t hear the change from one track to another midway through their experience, so more than ten minutes long or try to overcome the looping issue and wave goodbye to the clunky and sudden ending of the track.

Either way, this was way better than what I had originally planned. Since I can’t go to Finland before Christmas, I would’ve asked my dad to run around with a recorder to record some audio for me. I’m pretty sure he’ll prefer this one over that too.

Sound quality isn’t at its best, as the audio file needed to be compressed quite a lot for the blog.