Sound Booth

Not to sound too cynical, but an assignment that asks students to build a sound booth for a hypothetical library that might range in price from $60 to upwards of $300 for a concept assignment is a little bit absurd. In the comments section of the how-to post, someone recommended saving yourself the trouble of building one and simply looking online for a pre-made "Portable Microphone Studio Voice Booth Isolation Box". Might not be a bad idea, but the nicer ones in that realm still seem like they start at around $150 CAD.

IKEA LEKMAN Box with SHURE Mic and AKG Headphones for recording

I decided that I would take the same route as my classmates and look around for items in my house that might dampen the sound. When recording sound in the past, I've had to sit in my closet surrounded by hanging clothes to dampen the echo from hard surfaces in wide rooms. The closet method isn't perfect because you're competing with the rustle of dry cleaning and winter jackets in the dark. It's inexpensive, at least. Superior to this method is really about getting a better microphone setup. I have had a lot of great experiences with the Zoom brand of mics (which predates the conference software that we've all gotten to know only too well in this pandemic). The Zoom H5 Handy Recorder is a sweet little beast that makes everything sound so wonderfully close and warm and magically cancels out a lot of the peripheral sounds because of its directional setup. I have always had to rent them for projects; there's talk among my business partners of finally pulling the trigger to own one.

For this assignment, I used an Ikea LEKMAN box (an "almost cube" at 33x37x33cm in size) crammed with dampening materials such as some of my yoga blocks (which also provide stability) and a nice muffling pillow to line the inside of it.

Earlier caveats aside, here's my sound box setup using nothing but free materials. I don't have a "podcasting" mic on hand to test it out, but I should think that it would adequately muffle the unwanted noise and isolate those sweet sweet vocals.

Not the best mix for the digital resolution (only has XLR connection)

I used a SHURE SM57 instrument mic that I use to record acoustic guitars and piano from time to time (although, sadly, not in a long time!)

I can see how making a number of these would be fairly easy if you were to have students recording podcasts with multiple channels. You'd need multiple mics to preserve the audio fidelity while allowing them to be conversational.