This recording was made on my PCM-D50 as Keston and Westdal rehearsed with Graham O’Brien on drums for a recording session this week at McNally Smith.
Practice Recording
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Tag Archives: PCM-D50
Rain on the Tent
Here’s a recording I made last weekend on our second night of camping during the MS150 fundraiser cycling event. The weather for the ride was actually fairly dry, but in the early evening we experienced a brief downpour after the first stage of the ride in Hinckley, Minnesota. As I waited out the rain in my tent each drop of water that landed made a nice popping sound. The recording sounded much different than I expected, almost like static with a surprisingly wide stereo spectrum.
Post Heliotrope Bells
After checking out a few bands during the Heliotrope festival at the Ritz Theater in Northeast Minneapolis, I starting riding home as a light rain began to fall. It was about 1:07am. Halfway home I heard church bells. Loud, cacophonous, church bells. Not what you’d expect to hear at that time. I dug my recorder out of my bag and started cycling quickly toward the sound. There are churches (plural) on almost every block in my neighborhood, but it didn’t take long to find the one making all the racket. I stopped in the middle of the street and recorded the ringing for more than six minutes. There’s a lot more to this story, but for now, here’s one minute and sixteen seconds of what I captured.
Newspaper Printing Facility Ambiance
Recently I escorted a group of students on a tour of the Star Tribune’s printing facilities. I couldn’t stay for the whole tour, but managed to record a little bit of sound while I was there.
There were lots of chatty students and a wordy tour guide, but I managed to sneak away and record a few examples of conveyor belts, fork lifts, robotic paper transporters, and general machine noise.
Here’s an except of some ambiance I captured in the paper warehouse area where these giant reams of news print were brought in by railway cars.
Orchestra Tuning
To celebrate the University of Minnesota Northrop Auditorium’s 80th anniversary season a concert was performed on Friday by three-hundred students from the School of Music’s Symphony Orchestra and Combined Choirs. The piece was Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, Op. 125 “Choral.” The event was sold out and by the time I got tickets all the good seats were taken, so my recording suffered significantly. I was located near the front, but as far as possible to stage left. This left me in front of the ancient speaker system used to amplify the concert. There was also loud ventilation and the crowd ambiance seemed to collect in my corner of the space. Never-the-less the concert was thoroughly enjoyable, but it’s unlikely that I’ll do much listening to my ragged bootleg version. Here’s the orchestra tuning their instruments.
GMS Drum Solo
To create this silliness I set the GMS to play the drums on the built in Java Sound Synthesizer. I adjusted the tempo and duration probabilities to something ridiculous then captured the output on my PCM-D50. Since this experiment I have made a few more that are even more high speed and scattered. Perhaps I’ll post more examples of this nature. I have rare instances of longer durations inabled in the probability distribution, so as you’re listening, every so often you may think that it’s over (finally!) when suddenly it starts up again with obnoxiousness.
Bobcat Jackhammer Attachment
Wednesday, April 22, 2009 was a beautifully sunny day in Minneapolis. This quarter my schedule includes a three hour break, which I usually use for catching up on curriculum, ACB entries or meeting with students, but this time I let Spring fever take hold and got on my bike a rode around one of my favorite city lakes. There’s a nice spot on the lake where I sometimes read or take an afternoon nap. Unfortunately just across the lake from my spot was a work crew using a jackhammer to break up a cement driveway. If you can’t beat ‘um, join ‘um right? Having my PCM-D50 along, I finally gave up on the idea of a few Zs and rode over to the action to make a recording. It took a minute to get the levels right, but I think they were going to be at it all day, so there was plenty of time for a good long recording. Here’s a few passes of the jackhammer engaged and splitting concrete.
GMS Videos and Interface
Today I made two more videos with the GMS using a different technique than in Dodger of Red Lights. This time I wanted to explore what could be produced using visual input that I wasn’t directly controlling. The obvious, albeit cheesy, lava lamp came to mind, so I turned it on and went to work.
I connected a separate video camera via firewire, leaving a screen with all my interface controls available for me to tweak while recording. I recorded the video to MiniDV on the external camera, and as before recorded the output onto my PCM-D50 to free up the CPU for Reason and the GMS. Since I was recording the video on the external camera I had to the flip the video so that the image corresponded properly with the sound. This led me add a feature for toggling the mirroring in the GMS.
Click the image to see a full sized screen shot of the interface. All three videos are available on the Unearthed Music Vimeo account. Here’s an excerpt of audio from the piece titled Sound Globules.
GMS Piece: Dodger of Red Lights
Today I decided to see if I could create a version of what I performed at the MAW outing last night, as a streaming video with good quality sound. I opted not to use screen capture software so that all the processing on my Macbook Pro could go into rendering the images and sound. The imagery was created by manipulating a red, LED, bike light near the lens of the camera. The screen was then shot with a second camera while the audio was recorded externally using my PCM-D50.
I built a pentatonic scale using the note probability distribution feature in the GMS. The most likely note was a C followed by D, G, G#, and then B natural. I also used the probability distributions on the durations to get some stumbling rhythms centered around sixteenth notes.
Dodger of Red Lights from Unearthed Music on Vimeo.
MAW Kids on Bikes
Thursday was my first outing with Minneapolis Art on Wheels (MAW) and my first opportunity to project my work on the GMS in a public space. The sheer scope of the event was impressive. My friend Kevin could hardly believe all of the equipment that was transported by bicycles to the location. There was some really good work on display, some bizarre random events, and exhaustive video documentation that I expect we’ll see on MAW soon.
After the outing, on the ride back to base, everyone was giddy from the nice weather. We get a bit cooped up during the long Minnesota Winters. In not one of my finest cases of judgment I decided to dig out my PCM-D50 from its protective case and record the proceedings while riding my bike. I don’t necessarily recommend this sort of behavior, but I held on tight and threw caution to the wind. Here’s a segment of audio from the bike ride back.