Ambience – Neils Beach

I love recording ambiences in nature & living in New Zealand there is really no excuse not to spend quality time seeing & hearing the diverse environment we live in. Unlike many countries, no matter where you are in New Zealand you can drive to the opposite coast in 3 or 4 hours & in the process travel through many different ecosystems…
Recording ambiences to me is the ultimate meditation – your senses are heightened thanks to the directivity of the microphones (I mainly use a Sanken CSS5 stereo mic) plus the gain structure of the recorder – it’s literally like having very large, highly sensitive ears… But the meditative aspect also comes from the fact that recording ambiences requires total stillness, even an arm movement generates unwanted clothing rustle!
A few tips I have learned over the years is; take a small mic stand so you dont have to physically hold the mic perfectly still & take spare mic cables….
This last one can be crucial – the fist time I went recording down the West Coast of the South Island I got eaten alive by sandflys (especially at dusk) as I tried to stand still recording. I soon realised that if I ran cables I could set up the mic & retreat to the car while recording…

Here is a beautiful recording of a remote spot called Neils Beach, right down the bottom of the West Coast of the South Island.

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And heres the same location except recorded from a distance – its one of the most relaxing sounds, waking up on holiday when you are staying close enough to the beach to hear the surf! If you are feeling a bit stressed put this on your ipod & shut your eyes for 60 seconds…

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And here is a montage video of a few different places I have recorded ambiences down South (the third cut is Neils Beach)

tim field recording, SOUND DESIGN: 1 Comment

Ambient swimming pool

Next on the ambience recording list was an environment with large pipes (when you see the film you will see why) & a few emails later we were off to Kilbirnie Pool

First stop was the subterraneum filtration room pictured below, which sounded noisy & industrial – have a listen:
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Right beside the filtration room was a cupboard with a number of small rhythmic pumps doing god knows what, but they made an intriguing sound!

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To access these places we had to walk along these amazingly cinematic corridors lined with gurgling pipes – straight out of that great Terry Gilliam movie Brazil
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I have recorded liquid through pipes with my contact mic before, but they have always been metal pipes & the results have been somewhat subdued whereas these pipes sounded amazing! Does that mean plastic transmits sonic vibrations better than metal? I shall ask google and/or the physics hypertextbook sometime…

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I.D. the sound #001 – solution

Ok, maybe it was too hard… promise the next one will be easier!
people were close when they said sticky tape but it was in fact:

packing tape!
Not sticky packing tape, but the textured plastic kind people use to bind cardboard boxes closed. The characteristic sound was created by putting a contact mic on the tape as I split it, lengthwise..

one more listen:
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(the fact I used a contact mic rather than a ‘normal’ mic probably didnt help, but hey! more than a few of the msot interesting sounds in my library were captured via it)

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capturing the wind (part 2)

On the top of Brooklyn Hill, here in Wellington, there is a huge wind turbine which apparently generates enough power to supply 300 homes (especially during a Southerly!) While there is much debate about the visual aesthetics of wind farms I have to confess I quite like the look of them, in fact IMHO they are more pleasant to the eye than many of the architectural abberations (aka suburban homes) in the immediate vicinity….. But even more so I love the sound of them! Where else can you go to hear the sound of air being sliced by a huge propellor? Its not like you can gaffer tape yourself to the front of an aeroplane….

To give you some idea of scale thats my record kit you can just see sitting on the ground at the base – have a listen, here is a recording from last Sunday, plus one from an earlier visit:
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Matt had the genius idea of recording the interior ambience as an element for one of the locations in our current project & so a number of phone calls later we gained access to it….

And wow, what a great drone!
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Not that either of us were keen, but we were told in no uncertain terms not to venture up the internal ladder – just this view gave me vertigo…

Beside the turbine there is also a tower with various aerials & wind measurement devices… the wind was fair whipping around it…

Of course I had my contact mic with me & after speculating as to what sound could be heard from attaching it to one of the guy wires, we just had to find out:
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And this is the sound from tapping the guy wires:
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Next I attached it to the actual base of the entire tower & wow!!!!!!!
sub bass rumbles galore!!!!
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here is the same sound pitched up an octave, so you can appreciate what the rumble consists of:
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I think this is the best criteria for a successful recording mission:
to record what you set out to, but to also find sounds that you didnt even know existed…
bliss!

tim ambience, FX recording 4 Comments

backup

In this digital world you are only as good as your data & the difference between backup & archive slowly becomes crucial…. but if only we got paid by the file! I went to do a backup using Folder Syncronizer X on a third clone drive today (it hadnt been updated in two weeks) and after some number crunching & a few comparisons it concluded I had 51,087 files to backup! Ayekarumba – they can’t all be ProTools fade files!

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sound, as art

‘Sound Art’ is literally sound as art, in its purest form… cinema with your eyes closed, sonic expressions of a creative mind, none of these descriptions go even half way to expressing the perceptual impact of walking into a gallery & encountering an artform which employs sound as its primary means of expression. The first time I visited London back in 2000, aside from seeing every relevant gig I could, I noticed an exhibition in the gig guide of sound art by someone called Carsten Nicolai… So after visiting the Tate Modern I wandered along to this gallery & witnessed something quite profound, incredibly beautiful & oddly resonant to some of what I had been working on in film sound, the LFE channel of 5.1…

These photos do not do justice to the experience & it is a fundamental issue with Sound Art; how to document it? Its even more ephemeral than Video Art and as experiential as it is experimental…
Sonically this installation involved a number of subwoofers emitting modulated subsonic sine waves, which were exciting the room tones of the gallery both visually & acoustically. Sitting on top of the subwoofers were trays of water which were physically vibrating to the soundwaves, and with spotlights angled to bounce light off the surface of the water the projections of the interference patterns played beautiful synchronised projections on to the walls of the gallery…
40 minutes went by in three slow deep breaths and two blinks….

& today via vvork i saw this (& wished i was where it is, or vice versa)

Sustainable a dynamic robotic sound installation; mp4 video

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