I’ve been making some adjustments to my stealth recording rig lately and I decided to take it for a ride. I present approximately 20 minutes of my commute home to Brooklyn on the 5 train.

The recording starts with a walk down the steps into Grand Central Subway Station, a pass through the turnstiles, and a wait on one of the noisiest platforms in all of New York City. On one side of the downtown platform you have the 4 and 5 express trains and on the other the local 6 trains. The same scenario exists in the distance with the same lines heading uptown.

You’ll hear a number of trains arrive, stop, and roll out before I get on my train, the downtown 5 train. I often plug my ears while waiting because you end up with a cacophony of squealing and screeching from up to six different trains all arriving and departing. After about 15 minutes of onboard excitement, you’ll take a walk out at Borough Hall and up the stairs.

Recording Geek Note: Recorded with DPA 4060′s head-mounted. It was tracked to a Sony PCM-M10 with a Sound Devices MP–2 as a front-end.

Every since Hurricane Sandy hit New York I’ve been obsessed with quiet. I don’t think there is there is a direct correlation, but it something that has been on my mind.

The following is a short excerpt from a recording I made in late October from my apartment window in Brooklyn, NY:

There is nothing remarkable about this recording. It was made at the height of the evening rush and my block is shockingly peaceful. You can hear the sounds of light rain, a car pulling out, and tires spinning in a puddle of water. The relative quiet is striking to me considering I live in one of the largest cities in the world. When I think about some of the the common sounds in my neighborhood, it is shockingly calm. The summer brings the din or air-conditioners, birds, and insects. The fall brings rains and the tail end of birdsong, while the winter brings relative quiet. Every now and then you run into drunk dudes with snow shovels but that is an entirely different blog post.

This level of quietude in my neighborhood makes Brooklyn seem almost livable! But then again, our apartment is too small and years are probably being taken off my life from the layers paint on my walls. I’m guessing the first 50 layers contain the best kind of lead paint available on the market all those years ago.

Recording Geek Note: Rig consists of Schoeps CMC5′s setup for MS, with the MK4 as the mid. It was all tracked to a Sound Devices 744T at 24/96 with a Cooper CS–104 as a front end.

I’ve been known to record a few ambiences from my Brooklyn apartment over the years. Hurricane Sandy is on her way, and there is not much going on outside … yet.

Here’s a bit of ambience I recorded last week during a short rainstorm:

Light rain was falling, a small bird chirped away, and the occasional car rolled by on the street. This recording was made around rush hour, and I’m struck by the relative quiet. We’ll see what Sandy brings tomorrow.

Recording Geek Note: Rig consists of Schoeps CMC5′s setup for MS, with the MK4 as the mid. It was all tracked to a Sound Devices 744T at 24/96 with a Cooper CS–104 as a front end.

Getting out in the field and making recordings brings many joyful moments and surprises. I’m sure most would assume it is the wonderful sound I get to record that brings the most joy, but there are many other factors at play. It might seem odd, but I love research. I love searching for interesting sources to record, and digging for “unfound sounds.” I also tend to meet rather special people when I’m on the hunt for unusual material.[1]

REA_011 introduced me to a group of truly wonderful people: Soviet aircraft collectors, jet power enthusiasts, and radio controlled plane hobbyists. One of the most generous people I met while recording for the library was Roxbury Model Airplane Club’s Bob Karasiewicz.

My prior field sessions (San Diego, Brooklyn) were not only fun, they were also useful learning experiences. I was able to gather a tremendous amount of background about the variety of RC jets’ turbines and how the planes’ body types changed the pitch of the pass bys. Despite this wealth of new information and audio samples, I wanted to expand those sound files with additional material.

When I reached out to Bob, he had the turbine I was looking for and his plane had a different body type than the others I’d recorded, so I was really curious to hear what it sounded like. When I arrived Bob was all set up and ready to go.

Bob was incredibly generous with his time and explained every step of the flight process and which parts of the plane generate the most interesting sound. Because of his plane’s unusual shape, the pitches of the pass bys shifted dramatically during turns:

The straight pass bys were also quite nice:

As well as the take off:

So much of what I do relies on the generosity of others and their willingness to share what they love. I’ve learned that passion is driven by special people and their dedication is to be respected. My best moments on gigs are when an individual realizes I’m just as passionate about recording sound as they are about their obsession. Not only have I walked away from these experiences with wonderful recordings, but I’ve also learned a vast amount as well.

For some reason I have a thing for bells.

In the last year I have recorded nautical bells, church bells, buddhist prayer bells, gongs, and all sorts of animal bells. Cow, goat, sheep … you name it I’ve probably recorded it.

I didn’t realize that I had a bell problem until recently. I guess there are worse problems one can have, but it is clear I have a problem.

My most recent bell encounter was another set of church bells. I took a drive up to the country in New York state to visit a secluded Ukrainian Catholic church. The church has a bell tower that is its own structure separate from the church. The bells are not struck with a fancy mechanism, instead they required rope and human intervention. Luckily I was not the guy that had to climb the tower. I safely guarded my hearing from a distance.

The largest bell was about 4 feet in diameter and just rings out for days.

I’m not sure what this recent obsession is about, but it sure doesn’t sound bad.

Recording Geek Note: Rig consists of Schoeps CMC5′s setup for MS, with the MK4 as the mid on the exhaust. It was all tracked to a Sound Devices 744T at 24/192.

The following post comes to Fieldsepulchra courtesy of Game Audio Director, Rob Bridgett. I recently saw Rob tweeting about some recordings he was making around his neighborhood in Vancouver and asked if he might want to post something on the blog. Rob agreed. Here are the  fruits of his labor:

I first got my head around the notion of recorded silences through a friend who, at the time worked at the BFI in London, and was receiving requests from someone to access all the recorded ‘minutes of silence’ available from the archives. These would be moments of great weight, respect, and heaviness; loaded with meaning and an often-unbearable sadness. However, these recordings more or less amounted to a complete emptiness in terms of recorded sound, the vague shuffling of an awkward crowd, distant involuntary coughing, birds that did not partake in our notion of historic significance. There was a very interesting idea here – that ‘meaning’ could only be implied on recorded sound, and was not implicit or inherent in any of the recordings themselves. That did not stop the listener from attempting to provide that meaning, and being hungry for a context in which to put these ‘dead’ sounds. The fact that the person collecting these sounds was looking to find the actual recordings, and that only the recordings themselves would suffice, also said a lot about the notion of an ‘aura’ to a recording.  To re-contextualize these silences outside of their noisy and verbose parentheses and in context of other silences was also a brilliant idea.

Much later, as I became involved in production audio, and began having to source these kinds of completely empty backgrounds and beds for the sound design elements in cut-scenes, cinematics and in-game background ambience, I found myself doing much of the same kinds of research for suitable, empty backgrounds upon which I could build up realistic sound design.  These backgrounds couldn’t of course be ‘empty’ or ‘silent’, they needed to have a ‘tone’ and an ‘aura’ of realism to them, something that the listener could relate to about an ambient space that made the scenes feel real. Traditional sound library research left a lot to be desired, so one Christmas weekend, around 2002 I believe, when the buildings in which I used to work in were completely empty; I started methodically recording the empty spaces that I was familiar with every day.

Now, with a little time on my hands, I have started to document the space in which I live; not only the interior rooms and stairwells in an empty state, but also the exterior streets, building tops, vantage points as far away from people as possible. The main reason is to build up my production library, but I also find this kind of recording challenging and interesting. As a father of two, there is nothing finer for me to be in a completely quiet room in which there is an absolute minimum of activity! On a technical note, these recording are fairly difficult to document in terms of search metadata, and I find myself often trying to describe the size of room, ‘weight’ of AC, and even if the room has a dark or light tone to it.

As mentioned, these recordings are incredibly useful for production ambience, and I have found myself amassing a considerable library of both interior and now exterior ‘empty’ spaces. It has become an ongoing obsession; whenever I travel I find myself grabbing 3 – 5 minutes of whatever hotel room or space I find myself in. Every room has a different resonance, whether it is provided by a filtered exterior road, or proximity to air conditioning units within the guts of the building itself, but each room has different sounds at different times of the day. Different frequencies kick in at different times, often resonances occur that are not very pleasant, for example when two slightly out of phases AC units compete and create an unpleasant rhythmic effect. Every room also has a different way of filtering out sounds from neighboring rooms or spaces, or the materials used in construction have unique ways of conveying sounds occurring in other parts of the building.

One thing is apparent – no matter how clean and controlled our environments become visually and in terms of temperature management, the more negative the effect on the sonic environment. A lot of the meeting spaces I used to use for work are nearly impossible to hear people speaking in because of the sheer volume, and the vast frequency spectrum of the AC units in them. It is a fascinating contradiction to the way offices and workspaces ‘present’ themselves as places of positive human interaction.

Listening back to many of these recordings, it is clear they are still recordings of ‘something’, there is activity that just about be heard in nearly all of these recordings. What that barely perceptible activity is, I usually have no idea, and even though it could just be traffic, or construction, there is a human narrative element behind everything that you hear. In the same way that those historical ‘minutes of silence’ represented a very significant moment, these muted, micro sounds, bear a strange human significance beyond the recording that we will never understand.

These four recordings, though not thoroughly edited, are recent and collected from the building in which I live in Vancouver.

These are some samples from my personal production library of recorded office rooms dating back to 2002.

Recording Geek Note:  My current portable rig for roomtone recordings. Sony PCM D-50 with MM-HLSC-1 Sennhieser driven cardioid stereo microphones. I also use this for low-wind exterior recordings, but switch to the D50 onboard mics for higher wind using the Rycote mini.