Harmony is not the first thing that springs to mind when you think of chainsaws. I had the advantage of a large beech hedge to soften the sound a bit. Two guys must have been chainsawing away here, and the counterpoint one saw gives to another works quite well for me.
Resonant Bridge
Resonant Bridge, contact mic
Resonant Bridge, contact mic with no mass coupling to back of element
Resonant Bridge, contact mic with mass coupling to back of element
To a man with a contact mic mounted on a magnet, every sound source looks like a large lump of steel, same way as the guy with a hammer sees nothing but nails…
My luck was in when I came across this concrete footbridge across a dual carriageway. So I set up, carefully placing myself over the central reservation so drivers don’t get paranoid I’m about to zap ’em with a speed camera or throw stones or drop magnets on them. You get some funny looks attaching magnets and a piece of wire to a bridge by the other people, and the regional Police HQ is only 1/2 mile away. This unpreposessing bridge has a decent tone to it, presumably ringing to the vibration of the traffic passing by. Which was awesomely noisy – you don’t realise just how loud the tyre noise is on a road until you try and cycle a stretch like this and find your ears ringing afterwards. The contact mic worked its usual magic in getting rid of all this racket.
Resonant Bridge, traffic noise, OKMII binaurals w battery box
The two recordings with the contact mic were made, one with the mic held to the bridge with a strong magnet, the other with the same mic held to the bridge in the same way, but with an approx 0.5kg weight acting as a reaction mass on the other side of the piezo, to see if this picked up low frequencies better. You can hear the difference – or not, for yourself!
Piezo contact mics seem to cause a lot of pain for people losing low frequencies, but I do not feel I am short of low frequencies here, using a basic FET buffer. The peaks of the bridge resonance are 120Hz, 240Hz, 380Hz, 760Hz. There is, however, energy at 22 and 43 Hz at -36dB on the resonant peak, at a similar level to the broad peak around 3kHz which is probably the percussive sounds amplified by the piezo self resonance. The piezo was a Maplin YU87U 27mm 1.8kHz item terminated in 3.9Mohms, but the circuit could be improved to work better with a HiMD recorder mic input of 5k.
Amsterdam Rising
1 min bells coming in at varying times
Recorded from the roof of the Hotel Intercontinental, a few hundred yards from Amsterdam’s Centraal Station
I asked for a cheap dive close to the centre as I wanted to record a repeat of a concert from the late 1970’s which was repeated on DAB I requested a room high up, and installed a DAB tuner with a wire aerial slung out the window. Loads of signal strength, as to expected in the middle of the capital city. The concert was recorded digitally with HiMD and from the analogue output using my old MDLP as backup. The HiMD failed. Moral of the story is don’t edit your HiMDs on the deck if you want to be sure… Anyway, the backup was good.
After the concert, I stoked up with a few beers, and in the morning heard the city come alive to the sound of the bells. The first one started a good five minutes before everyone else, though the 1 minute format lops most of the overzealousness off. It’s a rotten recording, hissy as hell, even though the sound was loud enough to be easily heard through the window.
Why is there a hook sticking out of the roof, you may ask? It puzzled me too, but all was explained when I took a canal boat tour later on that day.
recorded from Sony ECM907 at 44.1kHz HiSP. High-pass filtered from 220Hz at 12dB/octave to reduce traffic noise.
recorded 19 Aug 2005
Ice Cream Van
Now here’s a sound I haven’t heard for a while – an ice cream van
The chirping of the local sparrows start off the clip, then as the van comes round the corner the kids get excited and the honky tonk sound starts
I’m not sure if this is a genuine mechanical ice cream van seriously off tune or a recording of one. It has an odd combination of honky tonk untuned notes combined with what sounds like really rough distortion at the end, but the recording is not over 0dBFS and not so close as to compress the OKMII mics
Ain’t the web a wonderful thing. Apparently these have always been electronically amplified. They used to use a Swiss musical box amplified by vacuum tubes (valves) as long ago as the 1950s. Nowadays the amplification is electronic, and, ideally, output using Grampian Horn narrowband speakers aimed at the road surface. The Swiss clockwork has long been replaced by an electronic chip to synthesise the tunes. Beats me what is wrong with a CD of the music box – you could have up to 99 different chimes that way. However, that isn’t the way it’s done. Thanks to Tom at MusicThing for the heads up
from 25 June 2006
Sparrows Chirping In The Rain
1 min continuous chirping
There’s something about rain that brings out the chirp in sparrows. I counted 12 of them, but the sound of this lot in the ivy and elder bushes sounds like a lot more. Why do sparrows all get up a chirp when it rains?
recorded from Maplin electret inserts on tree at 44.1kHz PCM to a PC via mic preamp. High-pass filtered from 440Hz at 12dB/octave to reduce traffic noise
Echoey railway bridge, Suffolk
I was recording the bees under this bridge when this family walked through the bridge. It’s hard to resist testing out the echo here 🙂
Cat Fight
I had a loop recorder running for a while, and this cat fight turned up. It’s a sound I associate with balmy summer nights rather than October usually.
Women singing in Ferihegy 1
Women singing at Ferihegy
No, I don’t know why they broke into song here. However, the old Ferihegy 1 airport terminal has an air of faded grace that the more modern Ferihegy 2 just doesn’t. That is a soulless modern airport building. This is a marble-panelled cavernous space that clearly inspired this lot to sing.
Swifts
A parabolic dish isn’t the right way to try and capture swifts flying low. I’ve got better at swifts as time went on – this was an early attempt and you just can’t track them with a dish
Lowestoft Wind Generator
Windmill in 15mph wind 1 min 10s
Some subjects you know are going to be a challenge. A wind generator, not surprisingly, needs wind and this was recorded in a 15-17mph northeasterly wind. That’s not the sort of weather made for easy sound recording!
This recording was taken about 100m from the generator at Lowestoft. The sound probably impacts about 500m away at this location next to the sea. This generator is sensitively sited in a really ugly industrial part of town next to a gasometer, and is visually reasonably well shielded from the town.
A gull turned up later and made a nice counterpoint to the blades
recorded 19 Feb 2006