#16

I decided to take two field recordings from very different parts of the world, albeit unified by the presence of water in-situ and - in part - influencing the most distinct sonic aspects of the respective recordings.

The first is one of my favourite field recordings that I’ve made: the flow of the Rocky River on the remote western edge of Kangaroo Island, its ambience regularly punctuated by the beautiful sound of banjo frogs (also known as ‘pobblebonks’.)

The second record is another favourite of mine: a recording made on Rassada Pier on the Thailand island of Phuket. This recording consists of a tyre rubbing against the bow of a small boat, which is bobbing gently in the water. At the time, I was struck by how resonant and expressive this sound was.

In order to bring these two disparate recordings together, I selected several excerpts from the tyre rub recording and positioned these across a continuous excerpt of the Rocky River recording, with the tyre rub preceding the ‘bonk’ of the frogs.

The original field recordings used here can be found elsewhere on my Soundcloud page:

3 Likes
#17

Really nice and interesting in terms of harmonics and rhythms. Successful and inspiring outcome!

1 Like
#18

‘Who are they? What do they want? Why are they here?’.
Great pulp track!

#19

This is great. The vent shaft takes care of the lows and the sprinkler system does the highs and the rhythm.

I’d never considered getting GAS from a field recording but I would now like a voltage controlled sprinkler system :smiley:

1 Like
#20

Haha… would be wild bringing it on stage🤩

2 Likes
#21

I wanted to mention that part of the idea for this week’s project came from my having listened to a recent @rrizzi field recording. The recording is an edit of material recorded overnight in a meadow, and the editing got me thinking about how editing field recordings create an ersatz naturalism, which then led to the idea of what if you combined field recordings. Here’s the track:

And here’s a bit of what I wrote about it:

https://disquiet.com/2020/06/23/overnight-field-recording/

5 Likes
#22

Continuous Listening

By default we are able to hear two places if we count each ear receiving a different environment, although the brain collapses the two audio streams into one. Continuous Listening is an inquiry into the human and non-human project of simultaneous hearing. In this track, we hear crickets on a mountainside in Seoul, Korea and the drone of Coast Guard ships in the Oakland Estuary in California. “Now hear this…” echoes across the waterway in one means of Continuous Listening, a military project consisting of the simultaneous monitoring of thousands of miles of US coastline. The crickets chirp whether listened to by humans or not (a series of surveillance cameras monitors activity on the mountain path, though likely without audio). Via the tympanum on the crickets legs, however, the continuous signal of the insect chorus transmits information on the collective to each individual.

Really I just wanted to use that track of the crickets in Seoul, and when I thought about what would pair with it, my mind kept going to the visuals of the Coast Guard ships at Coast Guard Island in Alameda. It seemed to me a space of absolute acoustic contrasts and sonic subjects. In listening to the crickets I thought about what would happen with simple edits to the sounds to emulate an insect-like splicing.

6 Likes
#23

Cool idea and an interesting thought - being able to hear two places at once in double mono…
I so love the sound of crickets, I have a bunch of recordings from various place I have visited, they seem to hold more than just memories of sound to me - I feel the air, time of day when I listen back to them…

1 Like
#24

This is just two field recordings I had made about a month apart in 2015. One’s in Vanuatu, one’s in New Zealand. It might be most fun to not say anything else, but I’m happy to explain the sources if anyone really wants to know.

Process-wise, beyond picking the start and end points for each, I just fade one in over the top of the other, and I’ve made some edits with short cross fades to remove some conversation from one recording.

4 Likes
#25

Currently I’m doing a Masters dissertation on soundscape analysis of the Colne Valley where I live, so I have plenty of field recordings. I used two very different recordings, a footpath over the M25 motorway and recording by the river Colne. I took about 15 samples in total and loaded them into a Akai MPC 4000, high speed traffic, river water and a helicopter going overhead. The samples were all set to loop in release, some of the samples had a tonal element which became more apparent when looped. No effects were used, the echo/delay parts are the loops fading in the release stage. I played each of the five layers over a 96 bar loop and the final audio was captured in Logic.

7 Likes
#26

Went for a bike ride and came to think of an experience I had some years back at a local beach.
It was raining and the weather was calm so the sound of raindrops hitting the water were really clear and distinct - in my right ear as I walked along the water. At a certain place there’s a stream flowing through the forest ending up on the beach, and the sound of stream was in my left ear as I passed it… Great soundscape and I clearly remember that being the instance were I became interested in binaural recording and other recording techniques that separates the stereo image.

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#27

Lovely and mysterious…great recordings and/or combination of recordings - and I hear crickets, right? :heart:


Clever use of both samples and MPC - great piece🦾

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#28

https://soundcloud.com/ohm-research/none-disquiet0443

Two opposing field recordings mashed, triple tracked, and positioned slightly out of phase.

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#29


For Catachresis I took two soundscapes which do not occur together in real life, because one of them is outdoor, the other indoor. Both have in common that we usually don’t listen to them, because they used to occur as by-products of everyday activities. I recorded myself walking on a gravel path in one of the parks of the town I am living in. My steps on a gravel path are the outdoor soundscape. For the other, the interior soundscape I recorded the fan of the old electric oven in my kitchen. In Catachresis these two soundscapes are juxtaposed.

4 Likes
#30

These two recordings were taken about 6 hours apart from my front porch: Wind-chimes (cliché!), pitched down to half-speed, followed by a thunderstorm that rolled in at about 10 pm. You won’t hear any claps of thunder, but rather a constant rolling sound as the thunder was continuous for almost 45 minutes (with a light show to match!)

I couldn’t decide how to combine them, so I let the road noise from the thunderstorm manage cross-fading. The band-pass filter isolating the road noise isn’t perfect, so drops of rain that were especially close to the microphone let in little clips of chimes.

I intended to use hardware but I could only find time over breakfast to work on this, so implemented in VCV rack (modules from NYSTHI, befaco, vult).

3 Likes
#31

These are small boats at a landing stage in Venice, Italy 2009, and steps thru autumn leaves in Munich, Germany 2019. For me, these are two worlds.

Because I already liked the texture, there is no additional mashup mumbo-jumbo whatsoever. Some solo time for each of the field recordings to get their idea.

6 Likes
#32

No crickets, much as I’d like to be equipped and able to record those macro sounds. Maybe somewhere down the line along with underwater sound. I’ve been looking for a good excuse to use the MPC in an unlikely setting and had to dig out the reference manual as it has been a while since I used it.

Cheers for your very generous comments.

1 Like
#33

If this comment was in my direction, then yes there are crickets in one recording. Thanks.

1 Like
#34

Yeah the remark was going your way…
Lines wouldn’t let me post two reply’s in a row

2 Likes
#35

Disquiet0433
Chic Double Scenery
• Key: F# minor / F# major BPM: 120 Time signature: 4/4 DAW: Reaper
• Instruments: n/a
• Plug-ins: n/a
• Used a recording of birds chirping and a recording of workers with a chain saw cutting up a tree
• Cut and pasted parts of each track to a third track after splicing the two source tracks at the transients
• Created a third track that was approx. 2 minutes long then reversed this two minute section and glued them together
• Sent the mashup track to reverb and delay

1 Like