I recently took a new job in New York, which meant a departure from the midwest and a homecoming of sorts. I grew up on the east coast and spent many years living in the Big Apple, but this is my first foray into the borough of Brooklyn. I thought it would be appropriate to document my first full weekend in the new apartment, so I set my microphones up in the window of my living room and let the recorder roll.
The first file was recorded at 5:00 PM on Saturday, May 9. It is full of the typical sounds you would expect: planes, traffic rolling by, kids playing, and city birds chirping. What I was not expecting was the sound of my neighbor’s cat purring on the floor below me (at least that is what I think it is.) It occurs about 30 seconds into the recording, so let me know if you think I am right. The Good Humor man also shows up on two occasions, but you’ll have to listen for that on your own!
The second file was recorded at 5:00 AM Sunday, May 10. It also features the same city sounds, but it is missing the kids and the cat as I suspect that neither species was up that early. I definitely wasn’t! I set the timer on my Sound Devices recorder, let it kick into record on its own and got a few more hours of sleep.
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That’s not a cat! It’s the PREDATOR!
I don’t man, but I think it is a kitty.
It sounds like a helicopter in the distance (the cat purring, that is..).
I guess this means you’re actually gone. Shit.
Nice sounds, though. As always.
[…] Michael Raphael moved from the midwest to Brooklyn recently, an event he described as a “homecoming of sorts.” He commemorated his first weekend in his adoptive borough with a pair of field recordings. Both were recorded in the same spot, in the window of his new living room, but at different times: one at 5:00pm (MP3) on a Saturday night (May 9, if you’re time-stamping as well as geo-coding your downloaded MP3 files), and the second 12 hours later (MP3). One before sunset, the other before sunrise. One rife with human activity (children, and ice-cream truck), one relatively bereft. More details at his blog, sepulchra.com. […]
I think it’s a side-effect of the helicopter.
However, I remember a fly landing on a microphone during a classical recording at my high school. No kidding! 🙂
[…] It’s quite funny listening back to a short recording I made of it earlier this evening, particularly having just been listening through fieldsepulchra’s blog and discovered some recordings he also made out of his window, in New York (in his post called Brooklyn Landing). […]