Audio Crits

Yesterday we had our crits for our first draft of our experimental sound pieces. Mine and Ellie's work received very mixed reviews. Here is our first draft for our experimental audio piece.

Below I will list some of the main criticisms regarding our audio piece and also the factors that people enjoyed and the improvements we will make.

Weaknesses
One of the main weaknesses that people found in our audio piece was that the sounds were too 'choppy' or they cut to the other sounds too quickly.
Another point that was brought to our attention was that some people didn't like the fact that some sounds were reversed and some were kept as they were recorded. There were suggestions that we should decide between playing all the sounds backwards or have the sounds play as they should and turn the piece into something with a musical aspect.
Some people found that our piece was too repetitive and that it needed more layering as the audio sounded quite 'thin'.
The last point that seemed to be a weakness was that people didn't think that the concept of the idea was very good and although you could tell that it was recorded in a kitchen, the narrative wasn't very clear.

Strengths
Most people liked the actual sounds we recorded as they liked the way it sounded clear and crisp.
They also enjoyed the fact that the idea was that the sounds were played backwards as they thought that it tied in with the brief perfectly as it was very experimental.
Another reason that they liked the piece was because they could see that the fast-pace of the audio captures the stress of a busy kitchen.
The fact that we used a variety of different sounds was also popular with our audience and they also liked the way that we edited it.

Improvements
To improve my piece I am going to make some changes after reading through the criticisms we received. We've decided that we should add an atmos sound to stop the piece sounding so 'thin'. We will also distort the sounds a bit more so it sounds more interesting.
As well as adding an atmos we also had a suggestion that we should add an entrance/exit to the kitchen. We will definitely think about this when creating our final piece.
We also were told that we should make our audio piece longer, we knew we had to do this anyway as the piece was just a first draft and not totally finished.

After hearing the crits from our peers and seminar leader we will make changes to help improve our piece.