Contributions from the OISTAT Sound Design Working Group for World Listening Day, July 18th 2015

World Listening Day 2015

Field recording

Date: 2013-07-05; Time: 09.42 am; Location: Kallaste; Length: 07'32

Kallaste, Estonia - Market. 

Listen to this recording at aporee ::: maps http://aporee.org/maps/?loc=19814 

[Hi-MD-recorder Sony MZ-NH900 with external microphone Beyerdynamic MCE 82] 

2013-07-05 Kallaste, market

Walk down Henry Street, Dublin. March 2013.
Binaural recording. Headphone listening recommended.

Henry Street Dublin

Botanic Gardens, Dublin.  3 sections- outdoors, by the stream in the rockery, and at the Wittgenstein steps (inside The Palm House greenhouse).


At the Botanic Gardens

I recorded every encounter I had with water on 16 June 2015, then edited it down to a short montage. Recorded on Zoom H4 in Pittsburgh, PA, USA.  

Joe Pino - The Edgar Wright Memorial Water Montage

A watery journey, from gentle rain to the deep ocean, through gutters, culverts, streams, rivers, weirs, and waterfalls. Recordings made in locations across the UK and North America.

John Leonard - A Watery Journey

The LA river is quite unusual for a river - there's usually no water in it. It is perhaps the largest visual metaphor for the draught that Angelenos are confronted by on a daily basis. This recording was made with a Zoom H4n, with the microphone about 15 feet above where the "water line" would be.

Chris Rummel - The L.A. River at Night

Recording device: Sony PCM-D50 (using built-in microphone) .wav format
Editing: imported into Digital Performer, applied fades, exported as stereo to .aif format
Duration: 03:49
Location: London, UK
Date: 17 July 2015
Acoustic environment: outdoors
Soundscape contains: birds, airplane flyover, distant chattering by the neighbours, car beeps, traffic, siren, Hozelock Multi-Spray Gun (for watering the garden), water dripping from the watered trees and bushes. 

Nela Brown - Watering The Garden

The piece is composed from harp phrases rearranged by global temperature records and guided by arctic sea ice extent data. 2015

Erik Lawson -  Harp Arranged By Arctic Ice Data

Everyone should have the opportunity to see water as a recreation.

Recorded Cincinnati, OH. Probasco fountain.  June 16, 2015

Jeremy Lee - H2o For All

I made this sound recording of a frozen lake in the winter of 2005/06 in the area around Berlin. Frozen lakes are known to give off most noise during major fluctuations in temperature: the ice expands or contracts, and the resulting tension in the ice causes cracks to appear. Due to the changes in temperature, the hours of morning and evening are usually the best times to hear these sounds. In my experience, thin ice is especially interesting for acoustic phenomena; it is more elastic and sounds are propagated better across the surface. Snowfall, on the other hand, has a muffling effect and the sound can only travel to a limited extent. The ice sheet acts as a huge membrane across which the cracking and popping sounds spread. Underwater microphones proved especially well-suited for these recordings: in a small hole drilled close beneath the surface of the water, the sounds emitted by the body of ice carry particularly well. The most striking thing about these recordings is the synthetic-sounding descending tones caused by the phenomenon of the dispersion of sound waves. The high frequencies of the popping and cracking noises are transmitted faster by the ice than the deeper frequencies, which reach the listener with a time lag as glissandi sinking to almost bottomless depths.

Dispersion in Ice Sheet

02. Painting

The OISTAT Sound Design Group is an international body of Sound Designers and Sound Artists who primarily work in theatre and the performing arts. Our primary objective is to foster and support international professional relationships and knowledge sharing. We are committed to exploring opportunities to exhibit and promote performance oriented Sound Design & Composition world-wide.  Our ongoing work to support this aim includes the organization and realization of Sound Design projects for the Prague Quadrennial and the World Stage Design expos. Our intention is to share the enormous amounts of audio and written resources held by the working group in order to make these more accessible to interested parties in whatever way we are able.

The Sound Design Group was established by the OISTAT Performance Design (formerly Scenography) Commission at its annual meeting in Bregenz, Austria in 2000. We fall within the Performance Design Commission of OISTAT, which also includes the Costume Design Group, the Scenography Group and the Lighting Design Group.