[Today’s post is a cross-country collaboration of field recordists, myself  (Mr. Noise Jockey) and Michael Raphael of Sepulchra.com. We’re simultaneously posting recordings from our respective museums of modern art. I visited SFMOMA in San Francisco, and Michael visited the MoMA in New York City. Please read both posts to compare and contrast the recordings and our observations.]
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art was pretty dead when I got there. The bright, sunny day drove most people outside, and it was a bit early in the day. What I recorded, therefore, was as much the sound of the building as the people within it.
SFMOMA is built around a 6-story-tall cylindrical atrium. topped by a suspended interior footbridge. I recorded on each landing of each floor, all the way up to the bridge. I also recorded in a few galleries with varying amounts of people in them. The reverb was astounding, with long decays and high-frequency absorption that made any sound almost a drone. With light attendance, the building channels sound in such a way as to render it calming and enveloping.
Museums tend to be genuflective, introspective places. They have a reputation as being places to whisper, hold your chin and nod as you look upon the works. With this in mind, I found that SFMOMA’s art galleries and its public spaces have related but different acoustic properties.
I'm killing this platter slowly with a screwdriver, and it never sounded so good.
Nothing puts Moore’s Law in perspective like ripping an 80 gigabyte hard drive out of an enclosure and swapping with a 2 terabyte drive. 80GB isn’t even big enough to act as a Photoshop scratch disk in 2010.
It’s not new ground by any means, but I did get some pretty interesting results, ranging from IDM-like chirps and squeaks to all sorts of weird drive vocalizations when I slowed the platter down with a screwdriver – much to my surprise, the damn thing came to a stop, jittered around, and then spun right back up again. Most of the sounds were pretty subtle (perfect for the MKH 50), surprisingly, but with lots of surprises. [I shot video of the whole thing, a still of which can be seen above, but really, a hard drive spinning is not that interesting. Trust me on this one.]
I had a great time until Chuck Russom suggested on Twitter what might happen if the 7200rpm drive would have come loose…
These sounds have only been normalized and no sound processing has been applied.
I learned a long time ago to share my mistakes with others. It keeps me humble, and reaches two groups of people: Those more experienced than me who can help correct my errors, and those who might not have tread these waters before and who can learn from my experiences.
Which brings us to today’s post: recording ambiences using a pair of miniature omnidirectional microphones in boundary layer mounts. I learned a ton doing this, but the end results weren’t great. Today we’ll talk about what I accomplished and why it might not have worked out as well as I had hoped.
After my recent post on urban ambiences, I decided to record some fresh ambiences using a pair of DPA 4060 microphones using two techniques I hadn’t tried before: spaced-pair stereo and boundary-layer microphones.
"Sump pump." I mean, ewww. What is "sump," anyway? Sure sounds like it's something in need of pumping!
Our house is very poorly placed on its lot. Since our place is downslope from the street, water runs down the driveway towards the house. Â Thankfully, someone long ago put a pretty good drainage system with an electric pump that pumps the water back to the curb, where it can run to a drainage grate in the street.
In the midst of a week of spring rain, I decided to toss the ol’ hydrophone into the drain box and record the pump, which is activated when a bobber reaches a certain height. The drain box is poured concrete, so it’s acoustically reflective. The pump kicking in is my favorite part, sure to be used for something later on. The big dropoff in volume is where the hydrophone was left high and dry when the water level dropped. Notice how the sound of air bubbles become more pronounced as the water level meets the capsule, and then passes by it. Water turbulence right on the capsule tends to be very loud, as it imparts direct mechanical vibrations to the mic element itself.
[soundcloud url=”http://soundcloud.com/noisejockey/sump-pump” params=”show_comments=true&auto_play=false&color=dd0000″ width=”100%” height=”81″ ] [Aquarian Audio H2a-XLR hydrophone into Sound Devices 702 field recorder]
Posted: April 6th, 2010 | Author:Nathan | Filed under:news
Just wanted to thank everyone for the amazing response to yesterday’s video. A hearty welcome to all new visitors, and much respect to my longtime readers! More posts and videos are coming in the future.
Speaking of longtime readers, many of them are linked in the Aural Linkage sidebar of this page, and you should visit their sites for Serious Sound Wisdomâ„¢. If you haven’t done so, also read Designing Sound’srecent post on the growing online sound design and field recording community. All these links belong to people who are way smarter than I am, and their insights and techniques are legendary. Check ’em out.
It’s also worth noting that a couple of the sound design elements of yesterday’s clip has been previewed before in previous posts on this site…
I’m pleased to offer the first video content on Noise Jockey, and outgrowth of an earlier post on recording bicycles. More to come.
Audio nerd bonus quiz: This was recorded double system with two microphones. The visible one was for the sound effect itself, aimed at the bike wheel. Where’s the other mic?
Ready for recording in San Francisco's Mission District on a rainy winter day.
Urban ambiences benefit from focused listening. Every city has its own sonic palette, and every neighborhood’s aural character is as unique as a fingerprint.
I work right in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District, a culturally rich and very urban part of the city. Best known as the hub of the city’s Latino community, it has its good and bad sides. The good includes more eateries than one could possibly explore, great boutique shops, art studios, and amazing diversity. The bad includes drug dealing, prostitution, and gang violence. As you can imagine, that makes recording opportunities galore.
This post’s track is a compilation of urban ambience recorded out of my office’s windows, at varying times of day. This is only a small snippet of my huge library of urban San Francisco ambiences, every one of which reveals another aspect of the City’s character.
Antennae on Big Rock Ridge, Lucas Valley, Marin County, California. I'm lucky to have found this damn thing in fog like that!
As mentioned in earlierposts, Ben Burtt famously made the Star Wars blaster sounds out of hitting tensioned wires. Who wouldn’t want to do the same? My interest was really in how much or little processing it might have taken to get such an iconic sound, so I had to give it a go.
Well, it turns out that the answer is “precious little.”
Here’s some more audio fun from my recording session in dense fog and high wind with guywires that were stabilizing an antenna array. (I highlighted some wind-in-the-wires drones from this session in a previous post.) This very short collection of samples hasn’t been processed beyond than normalization for loudness. It makes a feller want to go around hitting everything with a wrench!
Andrew Spitz's new site, Social Sound Design, gathers great talent and attitude...a rare combo.
I’ve been using the new SocialSoundDesign.com for about a week or so, and I’m mighty impressed. It’s a strict Q&A format, but with some spiffy features. Most importantly, it’s got people way smarter than me involved, and I learn something every time I visit. (Ooh, plus it uses a fabulous red and black and white palette like another sound design website I could possibly mention. :-p)
While this is true of other forums (some of my faves are listed in the sidebar), so far SocialSoundDesign.com (SSD) has an extremely low signal-to-noise ratio of content to attitude. Everyone is giving with their knowledge. No one’s copping attitude. Questions range from the remedial to the advanced, and answers are informative and varied. It’s amazing to see many of the major sound design bloggers and active online professionals starting to gather in one place. It’s like a family barbeque for the Online Sound Clan…with very strange noises. Andrew Spitz deserves huge kudos for bringing this great resource to life.
As with any such website, the community is only as rich, giving, and patient as its members. If you’re interested in sound for film, games, and any other medium, it needs your voice. Check it out, register, follow it on Twitter for new-question updates, and join the conversation.
Horse hair, water, mic, and wok lid. Now we're cookin'!
My last post featured teensy finger cymbals being dipped in water while resonating, recorded with a submerged hydrophone. This time we go a bit bigger.
So, I played the wok lid with a violin bow as I moved it into and out of a tub of water, again with the trusty Aquarian H2a-XLR hydrophone tracking to a Sound Devices 702.  The H2a can be overly bright on some material, but for this stuff it was pretty good! (Next time I should record the above-water sound to a second channel with a small condenser mic for more mixing flexibility.)
The recording below is 100% unedited except for some slight compression and normalization.
