Yan White: Sound

In the UK, we produce 434 million tonnes of solid waste every year. As a nation, we only recycle 17.7% of it – one of the worst rates in Europe. Due to the aggressive marketing of new technology and a throw away lifestyle, the amount of electrical waste we throw away is increasing by around 5% each year, making it the fastest growing waste stream in the UK. The UK produces 3 million tonnes of plastic waste each year. Approximately 85% is landfilled, 8% incinerated and 7% recycled. Over 75% of waste electrical goods end up in landfill, where lead and other toxins contained in the electrical goods can cause soil and water contamination.

These loudspeakers were collected over the last 2 months from locations across London.

Using freecycle.org, a site designed to allow any useful item to be collected and re-used for free, and a civic amenity site that sorts re-usable goods, I visited these various locations and recorded my journeys… announcements on the underground, birdsong alongside rail platforms, my own musings and comments on newspaper articles or things I have seen along the way, visits to the dump and freecyclers’ houses.

The collection of 192 sound files is played back randomly through 50 of the collected loudspeaker drivers which are arranged in 8 channels/clusters of varying sizes.

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In audio signal processing, convolution reverb is a process for digitally simulating the reverberation of a physical or virtual space. It is based on the mathematical convolution operation, and uses a pre-recorded audio sample of the impulse response of the space being modelled. To apply the reverberation effect, the impulse-response recording is first stored in a digital signal-processing system. This is then convolved with the incoming audio signal to be processed.

The primary goal of a convolution reverb is to sample real spaces, in order to simulate the acoustics of the sampled space.

Using a small Genelec monitor I played a sine sweep (12 sec, 30 sec, 60 sec) in the 6-storey stairwell that is used as a fire escape at London College of Communication. The tall enclosed nature of this space combined with hard concrete surfaces and lots of stairs create a unique and spacious reverb. 2 Fostex digital recorders were used, one to play back the sine sweep and one to record in both mono and stereo.

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The Edirol R-09 is a portable field recorder with built-in stereo microphones. I used it as my field recorder for ‘Loop:recycle’ and for capturing various ambiences. For professional work I would be using something like an SQN or Sound Devices 702T.

For its price (around £200) the R-09 has pretty good sound quality, though the noise floor is quite high especially on high mic gain setting. Its main advantages are size and good battery life. The R-09 fits easily into a coat pocket and runs for hours off 2 AA batteries.

Here is a recording of a rainstorm with some thunder from my bedroom window. The Edirol was attached to the inside of a velux window with electrical tape. Although it has a neoprene case it isn’t waterproof! From around 15 minutes of recording this was edited down to 5 minutes of usable sound (without sirens, aeroplanes, traffic and rail noise)

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Bay 66 Skate Park ~ Soundscape

The soundscape

The brief was to record and mix a one-minute soundscape..

I find acoustic ecology’s faithfulness to the location appealing and so my aim was to represent a specific place or idea, in this case BaySixty6 skate park in Ladbroke Grove.

BaySixty6 is situated beneath a flyover and is next to the metropolitan line. As such it has a lot of ambient noise. The semi-open acoustic produces an interesting sense of space in the recordings.

This was mixed on Pro Tools and I used an Izotope Ozone mastering plugin (maximisation and stereo width for cd setting). I used minimal eq, some volume boost and fast panning (with ramp-shaped U-curves) to enhance the realism of ramp sounds. I aimed to cram the minute with lots of information about the space, to represent it as fully as possible.

A couple of difficulties recording at a skate park:

It can be a dangerous place with lots of loose boards flying around

Trying to close-mic a very fast moving target is a challenge and again, could be dangerous to us, the riders and the equipment!

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This is a journey.. into sound… Electromagnetic sound!

These mics are sold as ‘telephone pick-up coil’ for about £5 in Maplin. It’s a small pick-up coil in black plastic moulding with rubber suction pad to attach to a telephone, designed to pick up conversations for recording. Kind of like old-school spy equipment..

Anything electronic or electrical will generate a magnetic field, and this baby will pick up that signal..


..and it goes a little something like this:

1. Library card reader
2. Lift
3. G4 Mac
4. iMac
5. Mobile phone
6. Photocopier
7. PC Laptop
8. TV
9. Payphone

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As part of a field recording exercise for my Sound Arts course at LCC, I recorded some ambience at the Walworth Road market. This was the day after Barack Obama was announced as the next President of the United States (and also my birthday), so there was quite an atmosphere of optimism amongst the traders and market-goers.

Although a relatively cheap mic, the ECM-MS957 delivers quite natural-sounding dynamic stereo recordings. It also features rotating Mid/Side (MS) capsules with switchable pick-up angle. The midcapsule picks up monophonic sound while the side capsule picks up left/right-difference sound. Subtracting and adding the two capsule signals yields separate left and right channels, and permits electronic adjustment of the pickup angle. The mid/side switch also selects the pickup angle between the left and right channels, either 90 or 120 degrees. The recordings were made with a Marantz PMD-660.

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I was inspired by an excercise used by Pauline Oliveros, where you are asked to remember 2 sounds you loved and 2 sounds you hated from this morning. It makes you think about how you perceive and remember sound, and I found that for me these sounds tend to have an emotional context which makes them stand out from the general noise and routine soundscape that we filter out.

So I took my R-09 recorder and asked some random people to talk about these sounds..

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