Audio Cookbook

Pencil Sharpening at Grandpa-George

This typical, mundane sound has become nostalgic in many respects, but not altogether antiquated. However, this example is less typical, mainly because the sharpener was not mounted on the wall.

Derrin and Doug had to work together; one person holding the sharpener down while the other one turned the crank. This gives the sound a laborious quality that’s interesting to me.

Pencil Sharpening

Goodbye Winter

The long cold Winter of 2008 and 2009 is not over yet. Anything can happen, but most of the snow in Minneapolis has melted. I imagine that my sentiments are shared by most Minnesotans when I say that I am ready to move on to the next season. Hopefully this will be the last of my winter themed field recordings for a few months anyway. I recorded these footsteps while trekking through fresh snow near Lake Superior. It was a very still night, so the crunching of the wet snow came through well with very little wind noise interfering.

Footsteps Through Fresh Snow

Nine Forms of Transportation in One Day

My first method of transportation was cycling to a meeting at my work in downtown Minneapolis. After cycling home and packing for my trip I walked to the bus stop, caught a bus to the light rail and took that to the Hubert H. Humphrey airport. I walked, took an elevator and an escalator to get to the terminal. After meeting my wife, we took at plane to Seattle and used the moving walkway to get to the bag claim area where her parents picked us up and drove us to their home in Gig Harbor, Washington. So the complete list is cycling, walking, bus, rail, elevator, escalator, plane, moving walkway, and automobile.

Here’s a compilation of excerpts from six of the methods of transportation that I managed to get the recorder out in time to capture. The sequence is bus, rail, walking, elevator, airplane (take off and landing), and automobile. I hastily transitioned them all together with cross fades in Audacity on my mother-in-law’s PC because I foolishly decided to leave my laptop at home. Thanks, Julie!

Six Forms of Transportation

Sony PCM-D50 Arrival

I found my shiny, new PCM-D50 in a box on my doorstep when I came home on Thursday evening. Luckily it was still there. UPS ignored my note to deliver it to the neighbor if no one answered my door. I haven’t had much time to play with it yet, but I have made a few test recordings in my house. It’s been freezing outside the last few days, so the forced air heating is on constantly providing every recording with some nasty background noise. To avoid the noise I made a few recordings in my bathroom. Naturally the first thing I recorded in there was the toilet flushing. Here it is in all its gurgling glory.

Toilet Flush

One Dollar Ninety Nine Cent 25oz Bud Light Taps

A restaurant named Adelita’s near my house has one dollar ninety nine cent twenty five Ounce Bud Light taps on Thursday nights. They also have great food. Tonight I met a few mates there including Kevin, Justin, Nils and his wife Sarah for seventy five or so ounces of um… “beer” with delicious tacos and tamals (flautas shown).

Here’s a recording of us all cheersing each other. Since the glasses clinking had a serious transient I added some compression, which brought up the background sounds of Mexican music and soccer announcers.

Frosty Goodness

Kitchen Sounds on the MacBook Pro

Subconsciously fulfilling the ACB metaphor, I recorded these sounds as I was preparing a spaghetti dinner in my kitchen tonight. I used my Audio Technica AT822 stereo condenser running straight into the MacBook Pro line in port. To my surprise I managed to get levels, but had to turn up the input volume in the preferences almost all the way up to get a good strong signal. In the preferences you can adjust the input volume, so the signal is running through some sort of pre-amplification.

Getting signal is probably the result of the condenser mic having a fresh battery, high sensitivity, and a short cord built specifically for the mic. It would probably not work as well with a dynamic mic. I wouldn’t recommend recording this way (without running the mic through a preamp), but I would be interested in knowing the specs on how the input volume is being powered on the MacBook Pro. Any Apple experts out there have any inside info?

Filling the Pot

Post Train Gravel Foot Stomp

As the sound of the freight train faded off into the distance and the railroad crossing bells came into view, I continued recording while deliberately walking on top of the large gravel that surrounded the train tracks. I particularly like the course crunching sound my footsteps made on the large gravel in contrast to the the softer sound of the finer gravel path leading away from the tracks. The wind screen helped but you can still hear some of it on the diaphragm giving the recording some lackluster, non-technical characteristics.

Post Train Gravel Foot Stomp

Sweeping the Front Walk

Here’s another recording made with the 3g iPod field recording kit I described in the last entry. This time I managed to get the device to record properly using the 96kHz sampling rate. I’m using the mic input on the iPod via the headphone jack, so the recordings are still in mono.

I held the Audio Technica AT822 with one hand as I swept cedar berries off of my front walk with the other. The cedar tree has produced hundreds of these fragrant berries this fall, so I need to sweep them away frequently to avoid litigation from the mail carriers.

Sweeping the Front Walk

Wobbling a Plastic Cutting Mat

I have yet to use this recording for anything. I made it about a year ago when I was working on the sound design for a 3D animated short. It was one of many sounds that didn’t make the cut, but still has an interesting characteristic or two. We’re all familiar with the sheet metal wobble. The plastic mat wobble is similar, but with less racket and a sort of low frequency rubbery quality. I must have been holding my breath during the recording because you can hear me breathe in deeply at the end.

Wobbling a Plastic Cutting Mat

Up the Apples and Pears

This recording was made with a Shure VP88 stereo condenser mic on a Fostex FR-2LE field recorder as I was leaving work this evening. I usually exit out of a back stairwell with cement steps and brick walls. In other words, loads of natural sound reverberation.

The audio starts as I open the door to the stairwell. First I ascended two flights, turned around and descended four. I then opened the door to the outside alley and parking lot, where I was greeted with post-rainfall, nighttime, city ambiance. I crossed the street to my bike where two workers packed up their tools in their van. Then I pressed stop, packed up my gear and rode home.

While recording I enabled the bass roll-off on the mic. Then I ran the 48kHz 24bit digital recording through a compressor at 4:1 to reduce some of the transient peaks and bring out some of the background noises. I also normalized it during the render to maximize the volume.

Up the Apples and Pears