I made a recording of this piercing high powered hand dryer in the bathroom at a local pub. My friend Joe helped by going through the hand drying motions as I held the PCM-D50 recorder to capture this beautifully obnoxious high frequency noise.
High Powerd Hand Dryer
I recorded this freight train during a winter bike ride with a group of friends recently. We rode through deep snow, on frozen lakes, head first into snowbanks and all over the place.
My friends waited patiently while I carefully held the recorder and gestured to them to keep quiet while making the recording. Although, this train made enough noise to drown out any other audible sounds.
Winter Freight
Tonight I’ve decided to share another of my first few Sony PCM-D50 test recordings. It is simply the sound of filling my bathroom sink partway with cold and then the rest of the way with hot water followed by the much quieter sound of the water draining down the plug hole. These sorts of mundane sounds are especially interesting to me once they have been recorded and taken out their context. Do we ever really listen to the sounds things make while we go about our daily lives? Probably not. And for good reason. If we were distracted by the qualities of the typical sounds in our environments we would never survive as a species. Our hearing is tuned to alert us when we hear irregular or unusual sounds. To my ears, ordinary sounds become extraordinary when I focus on listening to them.
Filling and Draining the Sink
This sound was made by manipulating the frequency and panning of a sine wave using the Minim sound library in Processing. I found that adjusting the portamento parameter has some strange and interesting results. Certain values for portamento seem to cause the sine wave to degrade into noise when manipulating the frequency of the waveform. I captured several minutes of this noise and then selected a small segment that has some unusual modulation going on.
Minim Sine Wave Experiment
Some people collect vials of sand from beaches they have visited, but I collect the sounds of the waves breaking on the shore. Well, it’s not much of a collection all I have so far is the Caribbean Sea while in Mexico and this example of Kitsap Peninsula surf recorded recently near the dock at the Port of Indianola in Washington. It’s a start, right?
I made several recordings at this location, but I particularly like this one that captures a sharp clicking sound made by palm sized rocks tumbling in the waves as they break on the shoreline. It was a very windy day, but despite a few bits in this example I managed to shield the wind from the PCM-50 by using a wind screen and putting my back to the wind behind the unit.
Port of Indianola Surf