You may have thought that I have posted some random clips of audio on this site in the past. That is a fair statement, but tonight I have converted seventeen recordings I have made with my Sony Ericsson K800i mobile phone to .wav format. They are more nostalgic than useful so I won’t be posting all of them, but they do have a certain charm in an ultra lofi way.
The phone records sound at 16 bit. The sampling rate, on the other hand, is only 8 kHz – nowhere near the fidelity of standard audio CDs (44.1 kHz). So here is something on a pretty high magnitude of randomness: a drum jam I recorded at a little open air club in Playa del Carmen, Mexico back in March, 2007. The music was good. The tequila was better. The recording is awful. If you brave this one out, then you know what an 8 kHz phone recording sounds like.
Phone Recording of Drum Jam in Mexico
love it! there is definitely a time and a place for low-fi recordings — I think they invoke a certain feeling, a type of nostalgia or ‘old-timey-ness’ — DJ Shadow and MF Doom in particular use lo-fi recs very effectively
It sounds to my ears a lot like a 78RPM acoustic recording — you know, where the musicians stood around an acoustic horn that’s attached to a cutting head.
So if you want that sort of sound for something, use your phone, sample some vinyl surface noise to lay over it and bob’s yer uncle.