Drift Field Recording

For this project I really did not use a specific drift strategy. I just walked around and went to wherever seemed interesting to me at the moment. This allowed me to more freely pursue interesting sounds. Throughout my drift I ended up on the prairie path, close to the beach, and in a parking garage.

10/14/09 - 4:10 pm - under a bridge
Sound Recording 1 (mp3) - :32
Spot Explanation

10/14/09 - 6:30 pm - in an alley
Sound Recording 2 (mp3) - :30
Spot Explanation

10/14/09 - 6:55 pm - parking garage
Sound Recording 3 (mp3) - :30
Spot Explanation

My drift started near North and Prospect in Milwaukee. Although my walk did cover a large area, I was in a pretty traffic heavy place so it was hard to find noises that did not include some level of cars. However, my favorite noise was more separated from cars than the rest of the sounds I was able to obtain. It is the second recording of my post. In the beginning there is static noise accompanied by a soft ringing bell in the background. This is quickly followed by the sound of a bird cawing. The bird continues to caw for a while as the noise of the bell disappears. It slowly drifts away from the microphone as the recording progresses and soon a car drives by. This drowns out the bird for a little bit, but it soon returns to the foreground of the audio. The bird stops cawing for a little bit and the sound of the bell reemerges along with more traffic. Finally, at the very end of the recording the bird is heard again, but this time very far away from the microphone. To me in this recording the most interesting thing was the varying distance of the bird from the recording equipment. Overall though, this recording is haunted by the stale and ambient noise of traffic. It is nearly impossible to escape this in Milwaukee and therefore I am sure many others had to put up with this. The traffic does create a certain texture of audio, but for the most part it is boring and too familiar to be of any real interest to me. I think if I am to ever record sound for a specific project I will either need to find a desolate location in Milwaukee or just do it somewhere completely different. Also, though I was impressed by the quality of these homemade microphones, the Sonys we used to record were not all that great to use.