#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🦾

1 Like
#28

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

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

2 Likes
#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
#36

The playlist is now belatedly rolling. Thanks, folks!

1 Like
#37

Crepuscular Chorus is a combination of two field recordings: the “dawn chorus” heard from Rock Creek Park in Washington, DC, in June 2020 and the “dusk chorus” heard from a ranch in the Hill Country of Central Texas in September 2018.

The composition is a simple cross fade back and forth between the two sources until they combine at the end. I’ve listened to these tracks so many times and am always discovering some new sonic detail in them.

Equipment/Software used:

  • Zoom H5
  • AudioMoth 1.1.0
  • Ableton Live

2 Likes
#38

A recording of a tea kettle coming to a boil that includes gunshots from outside in the street mixed with the sound of a broken cooling tower fan. I added some reverb glue.
Later I’ll choreograph the dance…

3 Likes
#39

Hi. I’ve been painting for four days straight. How are you?

Oh, right, this is the Junto.

My boyfriend and I have been volunteering at the local chapter/division/whatever of Meals on Wheels since last September, mostly food prep or whatever else they need. Recently they hired us to paint the dining room (currently covid-closed); we’ve no prior experience but apparently we did a decent enough job that they asked us to do the kitchen and a storage area and now the lobby and all the hallways and all the doors to the offices and I am very tired.

Anyway, I had made a recording of myself applying painter’s tape in one of the hallways by a large walk-in freezer, and I had coincidentally already poked through this recording and picked out some segments that could work as loops (though mostly non-dyadic). So in response to this prompt, I poked through another recording I made at Meals on Wheels – last month, cleaning out a bunch of coolers, outside, with a scrub pad and a hose and birds and passersby and many other noises – and picked out segments of the same lengths as the tape recording (ahem) excerpts. The cooler samples are panned left and the tape samples are panned right. I arranged the longer segments as loops with a random chance of alternating between sources, with a dry whole-note delay, and made the shorter segments into two drum kits playing different patterns but with a random chance of each hit triggering the other kit’s corresponding sample, with a bit of short bright reverb. I made two renders and layered them together, panned slightly apart, with EQ (highpass, high-mid boost) and a limiter.

4 Likes
#40

Two landscapes: the Presumpscot River in Windham, Maine where I like to fly fish, and my neighborhood in Portland, Maine tonight during a long overdue rain. Two forms of moving water plus birds, cars, and airplanes.

4 Likes