Minutes

Libraries

According to BBC Earth the robin goes quiet at midsummer, but this one is cutting through pretty strong on this 25 June evening in Glasgow.

Image from https://www.ncpedia.org/media/robin-singing (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode)

Summer Robin

Recorded 22 February 2011. Inspired by http://soundcloud.com/kim-walker/to-the-next-2011

Trousers, pants

One minute in the life of Partick Library, Glasgow. Recorded 23 November 2010 as I passed the time in the reading room while my son was at nursery.  Traffic passing on Dumbarton Road can be heard in the background.

As a contribution to the Bibliobeep and Disquiet Junto projects, I chose a segment from around 15 minutes of continuous recording that included a decent quota of beeps and voices, as well as an excellent demonstration of nose-blowing.

Library photo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ilike/2147363588/

More on this 127th Disquiet Junto project — “Record the sound of your library — and then maybe make something of it” — at:

http://disquiet.com/2014/06/05/disquiet0127-libraryshhh/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://disquiet.com/?p=16588

Join the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

More on Zoè Benoit’s “bibliobeep” art project at:

http://conference.ifla.org/ifla80/librarians-worldwide-call-beeps

Photo associated with this project via:

http://goo.gl/UJhtQr


Partick Library [disquiet0127-libraryshhh]

Pausing mid-way through the foot- and cycle-tunnel under the road tunnel under the Clyde, listening to the cars passing overhead and the gushing of an overflowing drain. Is there a better way to spend a wet Sunday? Recorded 11 September 2011.

In the Tunnel

Aquarium shop, Glasgow. The hum of the lights, filters, voices of shopkeeper and customer (with barking dog): Recorded 20 June 2011.

A dog and some fish

Ambient sounds of the cafe overlooking the curling rink at the Dewars Centre, Perth. As well as the conversation, the crockery, the glasses, and the hum of the display fridge, you can just hear the clink of the stones as a young man practices alone on the rink below. Recorded 15 October 2010. 

Cafe, Curling Rink

Close-up of father and son colouring-in a drawing, the scratch of their pens, their breathing. Just audible are the sounds from outside the house - the clank of scaffolding, a passing car. Recorded 12 October 2010. 

Colouring in

Cows sloshing around in the byre.  Scottish Borders. Recorded 30 April 2011.

In the Cowshed

Basic ringtone created with Sonic Pi.  The code is as follows:

sample :ambi_glass_hum
use_synth :pretty_bell
play 52, amp: 0.5
sleep 0.5
use_synth :dull_bell
play 45, amp: 0.75
sleep 0.50
play 37, amp:1
sleep 1
use_synth :pretty_bell
play 54, amp: 1.25
sleep 0.50
play 42, amp: 1.5
sleep 0.50
play 37, amp: 2
sleep 1
sample :perc_bell
sample :ambi_piano

Aardvark

The task set for the 26th Disquiet Junto (http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/info) involved sampling four items of garbage.  

I was keen to record the sounds of the garbage only (rather than, say, strike or rub them with a non-garbage item) so I realized I would have to record them making sounds with each other.  

I took a 10" pizza box, and through a hole in the lid I stuffed the cellophane wrapper for a pirate cutlass I bought earlier in the day for a children's party, and a banana skin.  On the base I placed an empty milk carton (1 pint, skimmed).  

I then made a hole for the microphone, and started the recording, capturing the sounds as I slowly (and at different speeds) opened and closed the lid of the box, holding it at different angles so as to allow the milk carton to move a little and giving the banana skin a chance to make its own insipid contribution as it tapped gently against the cardboard.

Eventually the microphone fell out on to the table, so I took a two-minute segment that immediately preceded this accident, and submitted the recording to some light processing, amplifying the volume slightly and adding some reverb, mainly to make it sound less kitchen-y.

For some reason I preferred to do this than watch the Euro 2012 final in Kiev.  

Opening and Closing [disquiet0026-composting]

The other day I heard - for the first time in many years - the expression 'squeaky gate music', and it occurred to me that squeaky gates are actually quite interesting. What do you think?  This is a recording of the squeaking doors at High St train station in Glasgow, heard from the standpoint of someone (me) loitering on the corridor-bridge that links the two platforms.  Recorded Wed 8 September 2010 around 6.15pm.

The Doors

Magpie call; Woodlands, Glasgow Sun 30 December 2018. Field recording, slowed down to 30%.

Magpie Slow-Mo

Extract from BBC Radio 3 announcement 1974

Annoucement

A contribution to Disquiet Junto Project 0398: Rauschen Bern https://disquiet.com/2019/08/15/disquiet-junto-project-0398-rauschen-bern/

The Assignment: Make music by making a collage of noises.

This project is the first of three that are being done in collaboration with Musikfestival Bern, which will be held in Switzerland from September 11 through 15. For this reason, a German translation is provided below. We are working with Tobias Reber, an early Junto participant, who is in charge of the educational activities of the festival. Select recordings resulting from these three Disquiet Junto projects will be played publicly as part of the Rauschlabor Schützenmatte (musikfestivalbern.ch 5) or broadcast on the festival’s radio show, Radio Antenne (radioantenne.ch 1). 

Step 1: Familiarize yourself with the German word “rauschen.” Understand that “rauschen” is noise in the sense of white noise, waterfall noise, background noise, static, wind in trees, rain, etc. The blurred, diffuse, continuous kind of noise, not short individual non-tonal sounds.

Step 2: Consider that the word “rauschen” is half of the family name of the late artist Robert Rauschenberg, who was famed for his collages.

Step 3: Record several “rauschen” noises and make a sonic collage of them.

For the raw material, I used extracts from recordings I made while inter-railing in France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Netherlands and Belgium in the second week of August: of heavy rain on a station platform, of the characteristic sounds of carriages, inside and out including the hubbub of voices (and in one case, the sound of dice being rolled in an on-board game of ludo).

The assignment made me think of Franz Kafka, whose first projected book was to have been an account of a train journey in central Europe, authored jointly with his friend Max Brod.  But it was his writings about the telephone that seemed especially pertinent here. In 'The Castle' he referred to the rustling and singing ('Rauschen und Gesang') that seemed to render it extremely unreliable as a means of communication, and alluding also perhaps to the common experience of early users of the technology who imagined they heard the voices of the dead in the crackling static.  (See J Hillis Miller, 'K. on the Telephone' in The Conflagration of Community, 2011).

I tried to layer the recordings so they approached the indistinct background noise of a telephone line, but foregrounded certain voices and other sounds in places to suggest the ghostly communications - the singing - some thought they detected in the purely electromagnetic interference.

Rauschen und Gesang disquiet0398

Recordings of eight separate trains passing by the kitchen window of a house in Carnoustie, Angus, looped simultaneously.

Train loops

4'33" of ambient sound of the Humanities 1 reading room in the British Library, recorded 25 September 2010.

Reading Room

Recorded in Partick Library, Glasgow, UK, 23 November 2010.

Local Library

A page of 14 search results on Freesound for 'vending', starting each sound file (set to loop) one by one, and capturing the result using Audio Hijack.  Consisting only of field recordings of vending machines on www.freesound.org by users calivintage, monnie101, cmusounddesign, ah107825, NoiseCollector, bsumusictech, morgantj, suonidigenova, and seejacksurf. (Actually one of the recordings is of an ice cream van not a vending machine, but fits quite well).  In homage to this current project: http://www.sound-diaries.com/?p=928

Vending Machines

Perecquian soundscapes.  More field recordings at freesound (http://bit.ly/azabfa).  

(Technical note: for all my field recordings I now use a Sony LInear PCM recorder with either a Sony ECM-MS907 stereo condenser microphone or Soundman OKM Klassik binaural in-ear microphones.  Older recordings with Minidisc Walkman MZ-R700)

bulldozia

Pinned to spotlight

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