For the benefit of Play With Your Music participants and anyone else we end up teaching basic audio production to, MusEDLab intern Robin Chakrabarti and I created this video on recording audio in less-than-ideal environments.
This video is itself quite a DIY production, shot and edited in less than twenty-four hours, with minimal discussion beforehand and zero rehearsal. Robin ran the camera, framed and planned shots and did the editing as well. We were operating from a loose script, but the details of the video ended being substantially improvised as we reacted to the room. For example, we discovered that the room opened onto a loud air conditioning unit that could be somewhat quieted by drawing a curtain. That became one of the more informative parts of the video. Also, while we had planned to do a shot in the bathroom to talk about its natural reverb, we also discovered that the hallway had fairly interesting reverb of its own, and it inspired a useful segment about standing waves.
Maybe the best improv moment came when someone inadvertently burst into the room where we were shooting. It could have been a ruined take, but we salvaged it by using it to address the idea that it’s hard to cordon off non-studio spaces to get the isolation you need.
Improvisation is such a valuable life skill. We shouldn’t make every kid learn how to read music notation, with improvisation as an optional side topic. We should make sure that everyone knows how to improvise, and then if people want to go on and learn to read, great.
