#37

I made these recordings on the Friday evening & Saturday afternoon by walking around the town I live in (Crécy-la-Chapelle, Île-de-France) during the 1hr permitted exercise per day. The government plan to begin easing the quarantine starts on the 11th of May, tomorrow.
Compared to a month or two ago the signs of life are already very much creeping back in. It no longer feels like a ghost town when venturing outside and you can feel that people are slowly easing back towards some kind of normalcy.

I went out both times hoping to capture the sounds of a relatively-small town gradually coming back to life, but actually was a bit disappointed each time that I didn’t quite capture what I was looking for.

Some of the things you can hear

  • Lots of birds
  • A river
  • My footsteps along an old secluded cobble path
  • My feet trampling some old dead leaves
  • @Elisa-room237 talking with some neighbours at around 8pm
  • Wind (regrettably - though I filtered out everything below about 190Hz)
  • Sounds of a small local supermarket; beeps of items being scanned, children running around with waterpistols, music from the radio
  • Car engines in the main square
  • People preparing for an afternoon BBQ
  • Some kind of hammering
  • Very faintly a man operating a sewing machine

The last two points are what I had hoped to capture more of - the re-emergence of the sounds of human industry. I was walking along my street and noticed that this tailor / fabric shop had its front door open and a man working inside, which I was quite happy about, but otherwise didn’t find much more like that. Perhaps an evening / weekend is not the best time for that kind of thing.

There was a small local market happening this morning which I had hoped to capture, but it was raining… and I woke up too late :sweat_smile: So perhaps just imagine what that would sound like.

3 Likes
#38

https://soundcloud.com/ohm-research/aoao-disquiet0436

The two metal working businesses near my office are still in operation. The buildings face each other, with a narrow parking lot in between. One of the buildings is backed by a dense forest populated by birds and, I am sure, many other creatures. I’ve spotted a swan in the nearby pond now and then. This is a field recording made between these buildings while on my daily walk. There is a reverberation between the metal buildings with the sound of the bird population in mid day activity that accompanies the sounds of industry.

3 Likes
#39

Backyard, Brooklyn. The third attempt, after catching the noise of the family in the house, and the quiet of my basement office on a Sunday morning. Instead, the sound of birds, wind, rustling trees, and traffic from an expressway. Recorded using Easy Voice Recorder on a Google Pixel 3.

3 Likes
#40

Forest lot of approximately a hectare outside of Boulder Creek, California. This was recorded at about 10:00 in the morning in our back yard, about 6m from a wasp nest. You can hear my wife exercising indoors in the background, and our neighbors up the road.

We’re lucky it was this quiet today; yesterday when I went out, the neighbor was running a wood chipper.

Recorded with a Sony PCM-M10.

1 Like
#41

garden coffee (7​.​57am / bank holiday friday / notts uk)

i havent noticed the birds sounding louder. everything seems quieter and theres more of a sense generally of that. that said, birds seem braver, like they’re getting closer than before. there’s a magpie who tries to get leftover catfood, who’s been landing close to us in the garden, who was tapping on our bedroom window the other morning.

i recorded this using easy voice recorder pro on my moto g6 phone
just equalized the low and high freqs and normalized.

i ran out of space on soundcloud again, and was unable to set up another account. ive got about 20 sc accounts so not sure if i’ve somehow been blocked from setting up another one. anyone know if this is feasible?

2 Likes
#42

Disquiet0436
Global Headpiece
• Key: All BPM: 124 Time signature: 4/4 DAW: Reaper
• Instruments: n/a
• Plug-ins: n/a
• Made an outside recording from inside my SUV and from inside my hoodie pocket while running errands. Made an inside recording by sitting my handheld recorder down on a table and letting it record what ever was happening in the room.
• Cut and pasted the recordings on to several different tracks in Reaper.

2 Likes
#43

Early morning birdsong, traffic noise, the odd pedestrian and dogs. Recorded with a Sony ICD-AX412 recorder with a wind muffler, on the bonnet (hood) of the car, just outside our front door. Bonus: sound of me walking out with the recorder and retrieving it afterward with Vaderesque breathing (must oil the door hinge, too!).

1 Like
#44

Our restrictions are being slowly loosened in Western Australia, and life is starting to spring back onto the streets. Restrictions still remain though, in terms of movement and social distancing.

Here is Nira the Staffy expressing how frustrating barriers and restrictions are, despite them being necessary for the good of all - in her case, she is upset about not being able to cross the street to chase the neighbour’s cats :slight_smile:

Recorded with binaural microphones, listened best with headphones.

2 Likes
#45

Short segment of a drop-rig recording in my garden. It’s Springtime and the birds and bees are doing their thing!

2 Likes
#46

I have to say I am really enjoying listening to all these field recordings. Birds, traffic, snippets of conversation, sirens, more birds, water, footsteps… They’re the perfect background noise for my work this afternoon. Well done everyone!

3 Likes
#47

The sounds of suburbia from my back porch around dawn. The drone of traffic on the interstate, distant train horn, birds chirping. I grew up on a farm in the middle of nowhere. Still don’t feel 100% comfortable with city sounds, but here I am.

2 Likes
#48

I live at the edge of a swamp. I meant (“meant”) to record the dawn chorus, but I am extremely not a dawn person. So here’s the dusk chorus of frogs instead. It’s raining, otherwise the birds would’ve joined. RØDE NTG2 pair (HPF enabled), Tascam DR100mkIII. But mostly frogs. And rain.

2 Likes
#49

I chose some of the trails behind where I live because they are a meeting of three worlds: close enough to busy roads that we can hear the traffic, wooded enough that we have coyotes and bears lurking, and well-travelled enough that I always across come across a community member going for a walk as well.

Not much else to say - I recorded it on a Zoom H4n. Made it a mono file so that my listener will only have to use one headphone. Did a little bit of EQ’ing and compressing to bring out the birds and lower the “room” tone.

2 Likes
#50

These are the sounds right outside the new home office on a rainy day, and the soundtrack to every zoom meeting that I’m in. Birds, drizzle, light wind, and an occasional car in the distance. Recorded about 8 inches above the ground where it comes up close to roof level (it’s a built-into-hillside house) using an SM57. Minimally eq’d to emphasize the birds and vehicles a bit. The cover image is the recording location.

2 Likes
#51

recording as I grilled [beyond] burgers. despite quarantine, human sound continues to mark the soundscape.

cheap lapel mic straight into an iphone

https://vimeo.com/417439456

2 Likes
#52

My first Disquiet Junto submission, hope I did everything correctly! Recorded outside of our home in Portland, Maine on a zoom h4n. I edited out a few heavy wind blasts, need to remember a windscreen. Also shaved off a bit of top end as I find the h4n unnaturally bright most of the time, and added a tiny bit of limiting.

Recorded happened while I was working and our 6-year-old daughter did some schoolwork in our front yard. It’s been a cold spring in Maine and today felt like the first day the birds have really returned, fighting over nesting spots and staking out territory.

Thanks for listening, I look forward to digging into some of the other tracks tomorrow.

3 Likes
#53

These are awesome! The titles are great too

2 Likes
#54

[quote=“homeontheland, post:35, topic:32115”]
al…
[/quote] I have felt like everything is amplified, but voices are mumbled. The tiniest noises mumble the faint voices further.

2 Likes
#55

I recorded the sounds inside my trailer. I used 5 kinda crummy microphones. I noticed a lot of high pitched noise coming from one of the mics when it got near a usb hub. I included that in the recording. I put one microphone above my faucet (which leaks) I stuck another small mic on my skylight. A microphone went on the headrest behind me facing towards the window. I recorded around 11:30 at night so there was not very much people noise. It started raining towards the end and trains did their horns.

3 Likes
#56

I listened to a number of other posts after recording, but before posting, my own. It’s good to hear the consistent presence of noise (from everything being so quiet) and wildlife. I went back to listen to my own with this in mind and noticed the quality of the noise evolving over the time of the recording, although I didn’t move while making it. Moreso, the rain and wind were likely changing on a time scale I don’t normally notice.

1 Like