You Must Work for Your Sounds!

...And work I did. From my starting point at Maryland and Webster I walked two blocks recording every sound I heard. Farwell was an interesting enough street to find sound on but the problem was that none of the sound came out to well when I played it back on the Mini-Disk player. It wasn't a recording volume problem or anything. It was simply the fact that there were too many sounds on Farwell for the recordings to have any style. They just sounded so irrelevant and wrong that I couldn't force myself to put any of those recordings in this blog.

Here is what I heard all at once on Farwell:
-Birds chirping (I really wanted this recording alone)
-Five different sets of Roommates moving in/moving out (I tried this out but it was distorted)
-The hum of power lines (Made for a barely audible sound)
-Dog barking in the distance
-Airplanes in the sky.
....and the real kicker...
-"GUYS! ... GUYS!... I'm having a good time, how about...I love beer. Look! A car! WHOO! PARTY! I'm so fricken...party!" (It was 4:30 PM and a whole flat was already wasted. I could hear them from two blocks away. I was almost embarrassed to record a little bit of their conversations but I still did it. That however, will not be the first recording you hear on my blog. I'm pursuing a degree in art not the anthropological research of early cavemen...I almost wished that was me yelling at cars)...Just a sub-note before we leave this topic. I came back four hours later and they were kicking a soccer ball into a tree. Perhaps they were trying to extract some feline entity from said juniper. Don't get me wrong, I'm not in any way shape or form trying to put myself above their actions but I did have a good laugh and I thought it would be best to share this experience with you.

So, Immediately after this I took a left onto Prospect where I found myself in a neighborhood that reminded me of my childhood neighborhood. I sat down, switched on the mini-disk, and started recording.

East Side.

I enjoyed watching a child ride her bicycle back and forth trying to win her distracted father's attention. He was hammering on a piece of wood. For what purpose, I don't know. I can only wonder. Car noises came from the background as people pulled out of their driveways and headed of down the road in opposite directions. I think I also managed to capture the birds as well as I had wanted to in this recording.

The next sound came right as I was lifting myself off the ground. Right away I saw a running jogging down the street. I immediately wondered what the Doppler effect would be like on a runner and started recording again.

Runner.

I also found another area to do a recording of the street. I found some metal construction pipes that would work as amplifiers. They were lying on the street right across from where the girl and the father were. I put one mic in each pipe and hit record.

Amplified Pipes.

If you were wondering about what the girl says near the end of the recording. She says "Look Daddy, I'm flying," as she flies past him on her little pink bike. Brings tears to my eyes.