Category Archives: field recording

054: Amsterdam Central Station

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20160616_134754Episode 54 of the podcast is a binaural recording of Amsterdam Central Station. I was sitting at the main train platforms until someone started to smoke near by, at that point I walked through the station to the busy street outside. I ended the recording walking to our hotel and going up the stairs to our room. The recording is about 20 minutes, no intro, but a short outro.

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049: Backyard in February

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Episode 49 of the podcast – a stereo recording of our backyard. Featuring several birds, the neighbor’s dog, the ever-present sounds of trains, planes and/or automobiles, beeping (why is there so much beeping), a light wind and a plumber bring a 100 foot snake into the basement to unclog our sewer pipe with noises of unclogging. The recording was made near one deciduous tree, and three evergreen trees, two living, one x-mas, next to the fence pictured above (a side note, our backyard is only about 400 square feet, so the placement was mostly to keep the mic away from the wind).

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047: A Walk to the Library

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A binaural recording of a walk from our house to the Mount Vernon Public Library. The library was a gift to the city from Andrew Carnegie and opened in 1904. It is located in downtown Mount Vernon, across from the Post Office and up the hill from the Mount Vernon East Metro North Station. I returned the second book in Rachel Bach’s Paradox trilogy, Honor’s Knight, and picked up Jonathan Franzen’s new book Purity. Space Opera for Literary Soap Opera. There is a little feedback in the recording from the headphones that are built into the binaural mics. It happens sometimes when the wind blows…

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044: The Falls

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Episdoe 44: The Falls – A three hour composition for headphones.

In December 2008 my wife and I took a trip to Niagara Falls. This composition uses some of those recordings as its base. I processed them a lot. The only bit field recording that remains ‘clean’ is a short recording from inside the Niagara Falls Welcome Center. There are three other field recordings in the piece, one a microphone that I dangled down into a jetty on the gulf side of Florida, a short recording from a picnic area just off the beach, also in Florida, and the other sitting near the Horace Mann football field in the Bronx, I was resting after a long bike ride. Besides these brief respites, the piece is tones, grumbles, wa-wa’s, groans, beats and other sounds created through digital signal processing of Niagara Falls. The piece is made at a personal scale, three hours, a duration that is easy to imagine, but hard to hold onto. Ideally, The Falls is to be listened to while at work – doing tasks that you may not want to do or monotonous tasks you like. I would suggest gardening, raking leaves, doing dishes, painting a wall or changing light bulbs.

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