Harmony is not the first thing that springs to mind when you think of chainsaws. I had the advantage of a large beech hedge to soften the sound a bit. Two guys must have been chainsawing away here, and the counterpoint one saw gives to another works quite well for me.
Tag: field recording
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Ice Cream Van
Now here’s a sound I haven’t heard for a while – an ice cream van
The chirping of the local sparrows start off the clip, then as the van comes round the corner the kids get excited and the honky tonk sound starts
I’m not sure if this is a genuine mechanical ice cream van seriously off tune or a recording of one. It has an odd combination of honky tonk untuned notes combined with what sounds like really rough distortion at the end, but the recording is not over 0dBFS and not so close as to compress the OKMII mics
Ain’t the web a wonderful thing. Apparently these have always been electronically amplified. They used to use a Swiss musical box amplified by vacuum tubes (valves) as long ago as the 1950s. Nowadays the amplification is electronic, and, ideally, output using Grampian Horn narrowband speakers aimed at the road surface. The Swiss clockwork has long been replaced by an electronic chip to synthesise the tunes. Beats me what is wrong with a CD of the music box – you could have up to 99 different chimes that way. However, that isn’t the way it’s done. Thanks to Tom at MusicThing for the heads up
from 25 June 2006
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Sparrows Chirping In The Rain
One of about twelve sparrows I saw, sounds like there were many more in the flock. 1 min continuous chirping
There’s something about rain that brings out the chirp in sparrows. I counted 12 of them, but the sound of this lot in the ivy and elder bushes sounds like a lot more. Why do sparrows all get up a chirp when it rains?
recorded from Maplin electret inserts on tree at 44.1kHz PCM to a PC via mic preamp. High-pass filtered from 440Hz at 12dB/octave to reduce traffic noise
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Echoey railway bridge, Suffolk
I was recording the bees under this bridge when this family walked through the bridge. It’s hard to resist testing out the echo here 🙂
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Cat Fight
I had a loop recorder running for a while, and this cat fight turned up. It’s a sound I associate with balmy summer nights rather than October usually.
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Women singing in Ferihegy 1
Women singing at Ferihegy
No, I don’t know why they broke into song here. However, the old Ferihegy 1 airport terminal has an air of faded grace that the more modern Ferihegy 2 just doesn’t. That is a soulless modern airport building. This is a marble-panelled cavernous space that clearly inspired this lot to sing.
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A blackbird sings boldly, Hotel Anna, Budapest
A blackbird sings boldly into the enclosed courtyard of this hotel in Budapest. Around him, the city gets ready for the evening. The wind blows some paper cups in the cobbled floor and then some people get chairs ready.
I was in Hungary to do some bird recording, so I had an SD702 and MKH30/40 mics. I wrote this post some fifteen years after recording him, but I still remember a magical urban moment. This male used the echo of the courtyard to amplify his song, the resonance adds richness to his tone.
He was in what looks like an ash tree in this enclosed courtyard. It goes another floor down into a cobbled floor that I couldn’t get in the photo, it’s stitched from four. Towards the end the hotel staff get ready to set out some tables and chairs.
I had another charming urban field recording moment in Hungary. These women broke into song in the marbled hall of Ferihegy I as I waited for the return flight. That airport was a throwback to when flight was glamorous, and the resonance added to the song.
location on radio aporee
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Lowestoft Wind Generator
Ness Point windmill, from the mic position Windmill in 15mph wind 1 min 10s
Some subjects you know are going to be a challenge. A wind generator, not surprisingly, needs wind and this was recorded in a 15-17mph northeasterly wind. That’s not the sort of weather made for easy sound recording!
This recording was taken about 100m from the generator at Lowestoft. The sound probably impacts about 500m away at this location next to the sea. This generator is sensitively sited in a really ugly industrial part of town next to a gasometer, and is visually reasonably well shielded from the town.
A gull turned up later and made a nice counterpoint to the blades
recorded 19 Feb 2006
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Amsterdam Rising
I looked for a cheap dive close to the city centre as I wanted to record a repeat of a concert from the late 1970’s which was repeated on DAB. I requested a room high up, and installed a DAB tuner with a wire aerial slung out the window.
Loads of signal strength, as to expected in the middle of the capital city. The concert was recorded digitally with HiMD and from the analogue output using my old MDLP as backup. The HiMD failed. Moral of the story is don’t edit your HiMDs on the deck if you want to be sure – Anyway, the backup was good.
After the concert, I stoked up with a few beers, and in the morning heard the city come alive to the sound of the bells. The first one started a good five minutes before everyone else, though the 1 minute format lops most of the overzealousness off. It’s a rotten recording, hissy as hell, even though the sound was loud enough to be easily heard through the window. I think this was using OKMII
Why is there a hook sticking out of the roof, you may ask? It puzzled me too, but all was explained when I took a canal boat tour later on that day.