Thursday, January 31, 2008

Sonic Journey Attempt #2

On January 26, I decided to take the opportunity to make the subject of my second sonic journey attempt* a trip to downtown Calgary to see if I could find, from memory, the McNailey-Robinson bookstore. I rode the C-Train downtown because I wanted to capture what was referred to my history class as the "simultaneous experience." (And because I don't have a driver's license.)

My goal with this assignment was to show a sort of contrast with indoor and outdoor locations of varying crowdedness. While I didn't find the bookstore, I did manage to collect some ambient sounds from Century Park. (I was walking by and figured "why not?"). I also managed to collect some background noise from both a McDonalds while I was having lunch, and from the comic book store on Kensington while on my way home.

All in all I found the experience to be a very valuable one. I really appreciated the different ambient noises in different locations. Unfortunately, since I forgot to test the microphone before I went out, the recorder picked up nothing but dead silence.

But on the plus side, I finally got the embedded player to show up.




Click here to listen.

*My first attempt was pretty much wasted because the recorder's memory card was full.

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

The sound that I have posted here is that of my "Funnel-Horn", a homemade musical instrument I made for my MADT sound class. The instrument was made out of plastic tubing, paper, and a plastic drinking straw cut into a double reed setup. The sound the instrument produced turned out to be a lot deeper than I expected it to be, and I would have liked a way to manipulate the pitch, but I'm still proud of the end result.

Click to hear my instrument.